The current economic expansion has been broadly-based across the states, with unemployment around multi-decade lows in all states and territories. While growth rates in Western Australia and Queensland have been the highest in the country in recent years, the divergences between the states narrowed somewhat over 2007, with high growth rates being recorded in most...

The behaviour of aggregate Australian private business investment has attracted relatively little attention in the literature over the past decade or so, probably reflecting the well-known difficulties associated with modelling it. This paper reviews the main drivers of Australian business investment through a discussion of some long- and short-run trends and estimation of error-correction models...

Individual pension accounts are growing in importance as a pillar of retirement incomes policy in the developed world. Policy-makers have generally assumed that by introducing pre-funded pension schemes, they can increase household wealth and thereby raise retirement incomes. However, there has been relatively little empirical work to confirm this. This paper uses microeconomic data from...

In the past decade or so there has been a substantial rise in the indebtedness and debt-servicing obligations of Australian households. This has been accompanied by a trend increase in labour force participation (LFP) for women and more recently for men. Microeconomic data show a clear positive correlation between indebtedness and LFP. This paper models...

This paper explores the effects of product and labour market regulation on growth in total factor productivity (TFP) using panel data from 1974–2003 for 18 OECD countries. Our regressions are specified so that labour and product market regulations can affect productivity both individually and in combination. While noting that the results are sensitive to the...