Asked to find an extra A$20 billion per year to fund government priorities like building nuclear submarines and responding to climate change, Australia’s top economists overwhelmingly back land tax, increased resource taxes, an attack on negative gearing and extending the scope of the goods and services tax. The 59 leading economists surveyed by The Conversation…
Have you ever bumped into someone with the same birthday as you? What about someone sharing a birthday in your workplace? How common is a shared birthday, anyway? The birthday problem, as it’s called by mathematicians, reveals problems with our understanding of number theory, probabilities and our assumptions of how the world works. It comes…
There has been a lot of talk about the risk of financial contagion following the collapse of California’s Silicon Valley Bank. Perhaps too much talk. While the frequency of bank runs in the past shows the power of emotions to move markets, there’s little reason to panic. We’re not looking at anything like the circumstances…
Investors are bracing for a longer period of inflation. The RBA has warned Australians that inflation won’t reach its target range of 2-3% until 2025. The US Federal Reserve indicated that more restrictive monetary policy is on the cards amid strong employment gains. In Europe, while inflation has fallen, it is still far above the…
Whatever the result of the New South Wales election on March 25, rising housing stress is a problem the new state government will have to confront. Soaring rents and an extraordinary lack of rental vacancies are intensifying housing stress in Sydney and elsewhere. Many low-income households are spending well over 30% of their income on…
The latest labour force data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows employment in February increasing by 64,600, and the (seasonally adjusted) unemployment rate declining from 3.7% to 3.5%. It’s confirmation that it’s still too early to declare that the labour market has reached a turning point, after which we can expect the rate of…
Tuesday’s tenth successive Reserve Bank interest rate hike is the culmination of a process that has added $1,080 to the monthly cost of payments on a $600,000 variable mortgage. I’ve calculated this increase in payments – which amounts to $12,960 per year – by comparing payments on the National Australia Bank’s base variable mortgage rate…
The biggest review of Australia’s migration system in decades is due to be delivered to the federal government. Commissioned by the Albanese government last September, its task is to identify reforms that will increase economic productivity, address challenges such as an ageing population, and make Australia a more desirable destination for highly skilled migrants. But…
Treasurer Jim Chalmers promised a Tax Expenditures Statement by the end of February – and he delivered it last week, just in time, on Tuesday, February 28. The statement contains many headline-grabbing figures about the cost of various tax breaks, including claims made against income from rental properties (A$24.4 billion), the concessional or zero tax…
Australia has recovered better than most from the COVID pandemic. As measured by gross domestic product (GDP), the economy is now 7% larger than it was before the pandemic. Over 2022, the economy expanded by 2.7% – more than any of the seven largest advanced economies, and more than twice the average growth rate in…
