The Productivity Commission released a Staff Working Paper ‘Can Australia Match US Productivity Performance?’ (by Ben Dolman, Dean Parham and Simon Zheng) in March 2007. The paper considers whether it is feasible for Australia to match the US level of productivity. While other countries have...

The paper considers whether it is feasible for Australia to match the US level of productivity. While other countries have caught up with - and even surpassed - US productivity, Australia's catch-up has been comparatively modest and patchy. International comparisons of productivity are useful,...

By lowering the cost of trade between the country of residence and the country of birth, migrants appear to reduce trade with other countries, so that the overall effect on aggregate trade is small.The effects of migrants on foreign direct investment appear to be different. Bilateral investment...

The objective of this study was to undertake a series of modelling exercises that took advantage of the additional available data to explore the effects of R&D on Australian productivity. However, despite the advances in data and methods, our research was unable to find a consistent robust...

The Productivity Commission’s inquiry report into the ‘Conservation of Australia’s Historic Heritage Places’, was tabled in Parliament on 21 July 2006. The Commission was asked to examine the policy framework and incentives for the conservation of Australia’s historic built heritage...

Many Australian farmers and rural communities have been experiencing hardship from the latest severe and prolonged drought. While this is not new to dryland farming, 'irrigation drought' is uncharted territory. Australia has always had a variable climate, with drought being a recurring feature....

A catalyst for this inquiry was concern that executive pay had got out of hand. This perception was fuelled by practices in financial institutions abroad that were seen as a key contributor to the global financial crisis. Further, while local shareholder value plummeted in 2008 as a result of...