News
Friday Fodder (1/24)
Here are a few short takes for you to chew over on the weekend, from the week's happenings that probably didn't need a full post. 1. A lot happens at sea that we don't know about A new study in Nature used satellite mapping
Justin Pyvis
Justin has a PhD in Economics and over 20 years of experience in applied economic, policy and investment analysis with the WA Treasury and AECOM in Perth, and Aletheia Capital in Hong Kong.
Competition
Are Coles and Woolies ripping us off?
Over the past couple of years, food in Australia has become expensive. So much so that even politicians have started to (belatedly) take notice. That's usually a good sign that there's going to be some kind of policy response, once the various reviews are completed and
Inflation
Inflation and Australia's cost-of-living crisis
I thought I'd kick the year off by commenting on perhaps the biggest issue facing the average Australian last year, and one that looks set to continue in 2024: inflation and the cost-of-living crisis. According to the ABS: "The rise in annual living costs for employee households
News
Introducing Aussienomics
First of all, hello and welcome! I suppose I had better start with a quick summary of what Aussienomics is, although most of that is in the name: it's a newsletter about economics with a specific focus on Australia. It is written by me, Justin Pyvis, an economist
Population
Migration fearmongering helps no one
The numbers are in: in 2022-23, Australia’s population grew by 624,100 people, or around 2.4%. That’s a huge figure – a record, in fact – and it was driven by the net addition of 518,090 overseas migrants. As you might expect, the media jumped all over it:
Employment
The true costs of JobKeeper
When COVID-19 struck, the Australian government – along with just about every government around the world – unleashed unprecedented support for workers who were at risk of losing their jobs due to the various health-related restrictions on business activity. One of the talismans of the Scott Morrison/Josh Frydenberg government’s response
Migration
How not to do migration
Australia has a long and successful history of immigration. Migrants contribute economically, help fill labour shortages, improve the country’s demographics and provide important cultural diversity. But as countries like Sweden have learned, migration can also present significant challenges. For example, last week independent economist Chris Richardson claimed that “we’
Migration
Don’t blame immigrants for the housing mess
Whether immigrants fuel inflation is a complicated question, in part because there’s no single, uniform “immigrant”. Immigrants can be students, skilled workers, entire families, refugees, retirees, or backpackers. Their ages also vary, as do their consumption, savings, and working patterns. Each of those features, and how they all come
Money
Does money make you happy?
Ah, the age-old question: does money buy you happiness? The general consensus is yes – to an extent. For example, surely the happiness a person gets from their billionth dollar is less than what they derived from their first dollar? Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton (2010) formalised this
Housing
Inviting criminality
When you create a system that makes it costly to do things ‘by the book’ – common examples are drugs, guns and more recently, building houses – you alter the incentives that individuals face in their day-to-day lives. In the case of housing, strict planning and zoning laws create positive transaction costs,
Housing
Good news from Denmark
Denmark has a housing problem. Not Denmark the country, but Denmark Western Australia – population 2,375 – which happens to be the least affordable town in the state and “one of the most inefficient communities in WA when it comes to the balance between large family homes and smaller dwellings, with
Artificial intelligence
The real doomsday scenario
US President Joe Biden recently passed an executive order regulating artificial intelligence (AI), which was met with mixed reactions. A common criticism is that the order was highly prescriptive – it assumed a lot a about the future direction of AI, even though it’s a huge unknown. One of the