The Australian Economy
Australia hasn’t had a recession – in the widely used sense of two or more consecutive quarters of negative real GDP growth – since 1991. Since then, Australia’s ranking among nations in terms of per capita GDP has risen from 22nd to, in the last four years, either 12th or 13th, behind only the United States, Norway, Switzerland and a number of other smaller states which are predominantly either oil producers or financial centres. Australia’s economic performance reflects a combination of luck and management – the relative importance and quality of which have varied significantly from time to time. Monitoring the performance of and analysing the prospects for the Australian economy has been the major part of my ‘day job’ since I completed my university degree in 1979.
‘Stagflation’
News, The Australian Economy | 27th October 2021‘Stagflation’ is the simultaneous occurrence of persistently high unemployment with persistently high inflation, which many economies (including Australia’s) experienced in the second half of the 1970s and for part of the 1980s. Some economists fear it might be re-emerging now. I talk to ABC Business Reporter Gareth Hutchins about this possibility here.
September employment data show ‘effective’ unemployment rate at 10.6%
News, The Australian Economy | 14th October 2021Saul was interviewed by Sky News about the Septembfer labour orce report released on 14th October Australia could see a ‘net rebound’ in employment come November | Sky News Australia
Old wine in new bottles: more ‘rent-seeking’ from South Australian manufacturing interests
Economic Policies, Publications, The Australian Economy | 17th September 2021There’s a new lobby group pleading for preferential treatment for manufacturing in the name of ensuring ‘sovereignty’, a word of which the present Federal Government is especially fond. But it boils down to the same old rent-seeking that has been a feature of Australian manufacturing policy for most of the past 120 years. (Full text […]
Housing Grants: more harm than good
Australian Society and Politics, Economic Policies, Housing, News, Recent Media Interview, The Australian Economy | 15th September 2021Saul talks to Tasmania Talks’ Mike O’loughlin on 14th September, 2021 about housing affordability crisis
Housing affordability crisis with Brooke Corte
Australian Society and Politics, Economic Policies, Housing, News, Recent Media Interview, The Australian Economy | 14th September 2021Saul talks to 2GB‘s Money News‘ Brooke Corte about housing affordabilty crisis
This is a recession – we’re just not calling it one
Economic Policies, Publications, The Australian Economy | 9th September 2021Op-ed published in the Australian Financial Review of 9th August 2021 – arguing (1) that we are in a recession now, irrespective of whether we have two consecutive quarterly contractions in real GDP, and (2) that although it shares some of the ‘responsibility’ for this second recession, the federal government’s fiscal policy response to it […]
Spoiler alert: we’re in a recession, even if it’s not ‘official’
Publications, The Australian Economy | 31st August 2021Jessica Irvine, senior economics columnist with the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age newspapers, discusses Saul’s views on the meaning of the term ‘recession’ and whether Australia is once again in one now
Is Australia having a Second Recession?
Australian Society and Politics, News, Publications, The Australian Economy | 16th August 2021A recession is commonly defined as two or more quarters of negative growth in real GDP. But that’s a silly rule – and it isn’t used in the US, where the body which officially delineates recessions last month said that the 2020 recession lasted just two months. If the bushfires of late 2019 and early […]