Australia is notably, if not notoriously, a land of much space but few people. Its population density is, correspondingly, almost the lowest of any country in the world: only Namibia and Mongolia record a lower figure. Australia’s extreme divergence from the common human experience has been a...

In a well-known paper Friedman and Savage (1948) advocated a utility function in which the marginal utility of wealth is increasing in wealth above some critical level of wealth. In order to win a reception for this novel conception of the utility function Friedman and Savage took some pains in...

The key problem of economics in Australia and New Zealand is its marginality. The history of its economics will, then, be at bottom an account of the confrontation of that marginality. Thus any story of economic thought in Australia and New Zealand will necessarily tell of the attempt to plant...

Currently there are significant challenges for the funding of Australian higher education teaching. Since the early 1980s successive Australian governments have shown an unwillingness to maintain academic conditions through public sector funding, and there is little doubt that this trend will...

The paper advances an answer to a puzzle: Why is any lending or borrowing done in terms of money, when such money debt exposes the lenders’ wealth to inflation risk? The ‘received’ answer to this question is that money bonds are just proxies for real bonds, proxies born of insufficient...

This paper develops a model of the costliness of inflation that places the locus of costs in the bond market, rather than the money market. It argues that inflation is costly on account on the contraction of the bond market caused by the riskiness of inflation. The theory is premised upon the...

Much of the debate surrounding the impact of immigration of the economy relates to the consequences of immigration for aggregate unemployment. In this paper we explore a related but more specific issue: the consequences of immigration on the probability of unemployed residents gaining a job....

It is opportune to esplore the conceptual basis of Higher Education Contribution Scheme, examine its revenue and practical implications, and ask if its institutionhas diminished the access of the disadvantaged to Australia's higher education system.

Bob Gregory contrasts ‘the presuppositions of Royal Parade’ of 1950 Melbourne with the present outlook of himself and Australia at large. He outlines the evolution of his methodological position from the University of Melbourne student to the Canberra policy advisor, and defends that...