In recent years, employment has grown strongly while output has grown modestly. This implies a weak growth in labour productivity that is difficult to interpret. In this article, we explore some possible explanations for recent economic growth and labour productivity outcomes, with a focus on...

The United States has long been considered the world’s productivity frontier, maintaining a sizeable aggregate productivity gap with Australia over the past quarter century. This paper finds that Australia’s industry structure does not appear to make a major difference to Australia’s...

Australia is (with New Zealand) one of the two most remote advanced economies in the world in terms of average distance from world economic activity. The rapid economic growth of countries in the Asian region in recent decades has resulted in only a modest reduction in Australia’s level of...

This article examines Treasury's macroeconomic forecasting performance over the period from 1989-90 to 2003-04, with a focus on forecasts of nominal and real GDP, the GDP deflator, the unemployment rate, and CPI inflation.

This article explores the relationship between risk and wellbeing, and the implications for public policy. Risk is an important dimension of wellbeing in its own right. People have different risk preferences, so policies to improve the match between preferences and risk actually borne have the...

This paper assesses the current size and composition of the global financial safety net, and the respective roles of the IMF, regional and bilateral arrangements. It argues that global economic policymakers, through the G20, must work to ensure that the IMF remains at the centre of the...

Market sector productivity — the output produced per hour worked — grew at an annual rate of 3.2 per cent during the five years to 1998-99, which was the fastest rate on record. In the five years to 2003-04, productivity growth eased to 2.2 per cent per year, which is around the average rate...

Despite a series of broad and deep macroeconomic and microeconomic reforms boosting Australia's productivity growth, the level of Australia’s GDP per capita remains well below that of the United States. A continuing gap in the levels of productivity plays a central role in explaining...

China’s economic transformation since 1978 has been remarkable. At the commencement of the reform period, China’s per capita GDP was lower than India’s, Pakistan’s, Indonesia’s, and Thailand’s, and about 3 per cent of that of the US. Today, it is multiples above Indian, Pakistani and...

The size of the imbalance in China’s external payments suggests that the RMB is significantly undervalued. This does not appear to have had significant adverse effects on the Chinese economy to date, but the costs of holding down the exchange rate are likely to rise in the future. While the...