Australia’s experience over the past three years of the highest inflation in 35 years is in large part — as it has been in other countries — the result of producers of goods and services, in both the private and public sectors, being able to pass on increases in costs to their customers or clients Continue reading »
Economy
A government is in trouble when it has to utter the banal and reiterate the damnably obvious. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is certainly struggling of late, a state of affairs all the more unspeakable given the calibre of his opponent. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton barely makes the grade of a two-dimensional politician, but has Continue reading »
Right now, human population growth is doing something long thought impossible – it’s wavering. It’s now possible global population could peak much earlier than expected, topping 10 billion in the 2060s. Then, it would begin to fall. In wealthier countries, it’s already happening. Japan’s population is falling sharply, with a net loss of 100 people every hour. In Europe, Continue reading »
Rising inequality in Australia needs a new understanding of how people live, not just economics. “No one held back, no one left behind”. That was one of the hallmark commitments from the Albanese government when it won the 2022 Australian federal election. Leave no one behind is also an underlying principle of the 2023 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted Continue reading »
Pillar 2 is a thing that AUKUS created: it appears at different times and with different meanings and possibilities and yet is not entirely, or even at all, predictable because the initial conditions and predicate logic on which it depends are themselves illusions or fabrications of the collective mind of those who constructed it in Continue reading »
As Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza continues unabated, the Israeli economy is facing a catastrophe. The physical destruction in Israel from the war has been minimal, but one thing has been destroyed: its future. It is unheard of when the headlines of Israel’s mainstream newspapers and the slogans of the BDS movement are almost identical. Continue reading »
Big data has contributed to a cultural shift towards evidence-based decision-making in academia, industry, and government, which prioritises empirical evidence over theory-based inquiry. It has also been associated with the boom in the publication of shorter journal articles and the decline in the publication of scholarly books, fuelled by the publish-or-perish academic rankings hamster wheel, Continue reading »
Mutual economic quandaries as both try to reshape their economies may force the two bitter rivals to learn to live with each other again. All is not well with Joe Biden’s attempt to reindustrialise the American economy. A new Financial Times report claims that 40 per cent of major manufacturing investments subsidised by his signature Continue reading »
Is China mired in economic misery while bogged down by old habits- or very successfully developing its exceptional manufacturing prowess as it expands and consolidates its influence across the Global South (and well beyond)? Never mind any apparent contradiction, one leading global weekly answers yes and yes to these two questions. As the Third Plenum Continue reading »
In the economy, as in life, it helps a lot if you learn from your mistakes. Or, if you’re in public life, from the mistakes of your predecessors. Accordingly, the caning that former Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe got for his assurance that interest rates wouldn’t rise before 2024 does much to explain why Continue reading »