Essays
A collection of long-form economic essays.
2024
Interest rates have come down in Canada and the eurozone. When will Australia follow suit?
Assessing Australia's March quarter GDP figures; why productivity is still everything; how opinion polls can be dangerous; and where are all the Korean babies?
Lower electric vehicle prices are the result of healthy market competition, not a bubble bursting.
Whether it's being sold under the banner of a "New Paradigm", "new centrism", "neopopulism", or a "Future Made in Australia", industrial policy will lead to less growth, insipid labour productivity, and a much poorer and more vulnerable Australia.
Why we shouldn't worry about migration; interpreting the monthly inflation figures; will AI displace financial market traders; should we worry about the 'pink tax'; and Albo's gift, on our behalves, to PNG's elites.
Australia's migration slowdown will ease housing issues but exacerbate its ageing population and fiscal problems, requiring unpopular entitlement reform and improved fertility rates to sustainably fund old-age benefits.
Biden's new China tariffs are driven by politics, not economics or national security. But protectionism tends to beget more protectionism, risking trade wars that could cause significant damage to the global economy.
The federal government wants to create a big new database to protect us from ourselves; who would an autonomous vehicle choose to save, a pedestrian or its passengers; a tale of two central banks; and the UK election in one chart (it's not looking good for Rishi).
Real wages in Australia have stagnated because the pandemic made us all poorer; a lack of wage growth just reflects that reality. If we push wages further above productivity, we risk disemployment, a wage-price spiral, and even a painful recession.
Peter Dutton claims cutting migration will free up over 100,000 homes and fix Australia's housing crisis. But his numbers don't add up and the impact will likely be minimal. Dutton's playing to anti-migration sentiment rather than addressing the real policy drivers behind unaffordable housing.