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Structural and Macroeconomic Responses to the Rise of Asia and the Mining Boom – AUS-M Model Simulations – (770Kb Word Doc)
Modelling of the economic impacts of the mining investment boom commissioned by the RBA using AUS-M, with the effects measured against a counterfactual baseline (the model’s best estimate of what the economy would have looked like without the boom). This was the initial longer report, a shorter version of which was published as an RBA research discussion paper in 2014. Peter Tulip provided a summary of the findings in the RBA bulletin.
Modelling of the Macroeconomic Impact of the Fair Pay Commission’s Minimum Wage Decisions 2006-2009 – (495Kb Word Doc)
This report contains modelling of the macroeconomic impacts of the Australian Fair Pay Commission (now the Fair Work Commission) annual wage decisions using AUS-M. Since the advent of enterprise bargaining in the 1990s, the proportion of the workforce that is award reliant has shrunk. As award workers are low paid and often work part-time they only form a small part of the cost base of the economy. Hence award increases no longer have large macroeconomic impacts on inflation or employment. And the effect of the wage tribunal’s decisions are asymmetric – it’s possible for the Fair Work Commission to push wages up when they should be growing more slowly, but it’s less easy for the tribunal to restrain them when wages in general are growing more rapidly. (There is nothing to stop employers paying above award wages.) That means the tribunal’s decisions tend to have much smaller effects on economic outcomes when the labour market is buoyant and the unemployment rate low.
How JobKeeper could be replaced by a better JobMaker – (21Kb Word Doc)
Published in the AFR 29-03-2021
An article about how JobMaker could be revamped to replace JobKeeper. Up until the end of March, JobKeeper was paying the salary of a million workers. This month there is nothing. JobMaker was the 4 billion dollar programme that was meant to replace it, but while well intended, the design was flawed. And we have a proposal to change that so it does its job and helps tens of thousands of businesses to stay open and keep their staff.
Quarterly model update (Late 2019) – (2.3Mb PDF)
This has some model analysis of fiscal policy at the zero bound from page 30 onwards that might be useful background for anyone who wants to understand a little more about our proposal.
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Director: Peter Downes B.Ec UQ, MSc.Ec LSE
Former Treasury and OECD Official
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