Good Jobs Begin in School
Publication | 10 October 2011 | John Daley
The Prime Minister's Future Jobs forum was missing the one minister who would make the most difference to future jobs, the School Education Minister. The economy and the workplace are changing all the time. Government's task is not to dictate their shape or to protect industries. It is to equip Australians to be able to innovate and manage change. The best way to do that is to raise the quality of school education.
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The Tax Reform Challenge
Publication | 21 September 2011 | Saul Eslake
Adam Smith said that a good taxation system should be equitable between taxpayers, certain in its impact on each of them, simple to comply with and parsimonious in its administration costs. Sadly, the Australian tax system is none of these. In fact, if you hired a consultant to create a system that encouraged the accumulation of wealth through borrowing and speculating while penalising such accumulation through working and saving, he or she would hand you a copy of the Australian Tax Income Assessment Act. Change is desperately needed, but don't bet on it happening soon.
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The Resources Boom, Structural Change and 'Closing the Gap'
Publication | 19 September 2011 | Saul Eslake
Australia is experiencing what may be the largest and longest commodities boom in its history. Through a sovereign wealth fund built on budget surpluses generated by the boom, we could tackle some of our most intractable problems, including the cost of an ageing population, the transition to a low-carbon economy and the stubborn reality of Indigenous disadvantage. We have an unprecedented opportunity. But do we have the foresight to take it?
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Productivity - The Lost Decade
Publication | 16 August 2011 | Saul Eslake
Australian workers increased their productivity far less in the past decade than in the previous one. They are also increasingly less productive than workers in most comparable countries. Since rising productivity is vital to a strong economy, the problem is serious, even if its consequences are not yet visible. Until recently the official account held that large investments in mining and utilities, and the lag time before they took effect, was driving declining productivity growth, but Grattan Institute research has shown that most industries are suffering the problem.
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Big Shifts in the Global Economy
Event | 15 August 2011 | Professor Michael Spence
Professor Michael Spence, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, examined how emerging economies are reshaping the global economy and the international order.
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Transparency in Trade Policy
Publication | 19 July 2011 | Saul Eslake
When trade barriers are removed, the country removing the barrier often benefits most. All Australians have benefited from the Productivity Commission's role in persuading policy makers to remove Australia's trade barriers, often unilaterally. The Productivity Commission should also be given a role to review proposed trade agreements. Government fears that the Productivity Commission's "quantitative analysis can be highly misleading" are misplaced.
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Losing the Productivity Race
Publication | 7 July 2011 | John Daley and Marcus Walsh
The construction sector in Australia is only about half as productive as in the US. Like too many other Australian sectors it has fallen further behind over the last decade. Its challenges illustrate why productivity is so weak and what we need to do to reform.
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Commodity Prices
Publication | 23 June 2011 | Saul Eslake
Commodity prices are likely to stay substantially higher than their average between 1980 and 2000, even if they drop from recent peaks. The steady rise in prices since the early 2000s was driven by China and India passing through a stage of economic development that in other countries increased the demand per capita for minerals and food. This stage will probably last for at least another decade in China, and perhaps 20 years in India. Supply may not increase in response as quickly as in previous cycles: the mining industry has become more concentrated, the more easily obtainable deposits of minerals and energy have been depleted, agriculture productivity has slowed, and climate change may be reducing agricultural capacity.
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Trading Our Way to More Jobs and Prosperity
Event | 7 June 2011 | Trade Minister Craig Emerson
In April, Trade Minister Craig Emerson released the Gillard Government's Trade Policy Statement: "Trading our way to more jobs and prosperity". This aims to put the pursuit of free trade at the heart of the Government's economic reform program. At this event, the Minister will outline the five principles of this policy, and discuss how sound trade policy and solid economic reform should work hand-in-hand.
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Manufacturing Regained: New Prospects for Business and Regional Communities
Event | 5 April 2011 | Dan Swinney
Grattan Institute, in association with the Foundation for Sustainable Economic Development, the Centre for Public Policy, and Enterprise Connect, presented an evening forum with Dan Swinney, Executive Director of the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council. In this session, he reflected on the Council's 25-year effort to maintain and expand high-skilled manufacturing jobs.
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Need to Address Productivity Slump
Publication | 8 March 2011 | John Daley
A concerted effort to improve Australian productivity is needed now so that all of us can enjoy the higher living standards this brings.
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Australia's Productivity Challenge
Publication | 01 February 2011 | Saul Eslake and Marcus Walsh
Australia's productivity performance deteriorated over the past decade, with the broadest measure of productivity growth going backwards over the past five years. A broad range of industries have slowed. In the long run this will impair Australian quality of living, and our ability to respond to everything from an ageing population to climate change.
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Australian Business Economists' Annual Forecasting Conference
Publication | 8 December 2010 | Saul Eslake
Saul Eslake spoke at the Australian Business Economists' annual Forecasting Conference in Sydney on Wednesday 8 December. His presentation looked at why productivity matters in the current Australian context and what could be done to improve Australia's productivity performance.
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Infrastructure Investment and Productivity - Address to the Economic Society
Publication | 3 December 2010 | Saul Eslake
With Australia's productivity performance continuing to deteriorate, the nation needs to look at how to foster the next round of productivity growth. Grattan Institute's productivity growth program is investigating the reasons for this decline and various remedies for it, including enhancing the quantity and quality of Australia's stock of infrastructure, improvements to skills and vocational training, and the role of innovation.
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Understanding Australia's Productivity Performance - A Grattan Report
Event | 11 November 2010 | Saul Eslake
The Nobel Prize-winning economist (and more recently New York Times columnist), Paul Krugman, famously described productivity as being "not everything, but in the long run nearly everything". At this event, Saul Eslake discussed Grattan Institute's Productivity Growth Program's first report, which examines how productivity growth is important to meeting several of Australia's more important economic challenges; a new perspective on the reasons for the marked deterioration in Australia's productivity growth performance over the past decade; and a preliminary look at some of the policy options for reversing that trend over the decade ahead.
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Australia's Productivity Performance
Publication | 25 September 2010 | Saul Eslake
Saul Eslake's presentation to the Australian Treasury on Australia's productivity performance.
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Australia's Productivity Performance and Drivers of Future Prosperity
Publication | 16 September 2010 | Saul Eslake and Marcus Walsh
Saul Eslake's presentation on productivity indicators to the ABS Natstats 2010 Conference.
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Economic Returns to Education
Event | 6 May 2010 | Colm Harmon, Saul Eslake, Ben Jensen
What are the links between education and productivity? With the Australian school education system currently going through a major reform, Grattan Institute hosted a seminar which discussed the relationship between education and economic returns. Will the proposed education reforms make a difference to Australian productivity?
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An Analysis of Victoria's Labour Productivity Performance
Publication | 15 April 2010 | Saul Eslake
Saul Eslake addressed a seminar for Victorian public servants from the Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development, Treasury, Premier and Cabinet, and Planning and Community Development where he discussed An analysis of Victoria's labour productivity performance.
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Education Investment Better for Tasmanian Living Standards and Productivity
Publication | 11 March 2010 | Saul Eslake
A sustained focus on year 12 retention rates and school performance is needed to lift Tasmanian living standards. Although Tasmanian's outcomes have improved over the last 10 years, Tasmania has significantly lagged the mainland for decades on living standards, life expectancy, long-term unemployment, and disadvantaged children. A fundamental cause is that Tasmanian productivity is significantly behind the mainland in most industries. Productivity could be substantially higher if Tasmania lifted year twelve retention rates and school performance to mainland levels, along with curriculum reform.
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2% Productivity Growth Target is a Worthy Objective
Publication | 2 February 2010 | Saul Eslake
Economic growth, in the sense of growth in the income derived from the production of goods and services, comes from four sources: from population growth; from growth in the proportion of the population employed in producing goods and services; from increases in the hours worked by those who are employed in producing goods and services; and from increases in the value of the goods and services produced by those in employment for each hour that they work.
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Productivity and Economic Reform - Address to the Economic Society
Publication | 4 December 2009 | Saul Eslake
Productivity is, as Reserve Bank Governor put it earlier this year, "the only real basis for optimism about future income". Or, as Paul Krugman famously put it, before he himself became as well-known as his columns in the New York Times and his Nobel Prize have since made him, productivity 'isn't everything, but in the long run it's nearly everything. Alan Blinder and William Baumol explain why: because 'nothing contributes more to reduction of poverty, to increases in leisure, and to the country's ability to finance education, public health, environment and the arts.
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After the Crisis: Social Policy Challenges
Publication | 5 November 2009 | Saul Eslake
Australian experience of the global financial crisis has turned out to be remarkably benign, both by comparison with that of most other advanced economies and with what was commonly expected in the early stages of the crisis.
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Key Challenges for Australian Economic Managers
Publication | 1 October 2009 | Saul Eslake
Australian economic policy makers face any number of challenges at the moment and it is not possible to do justice to them in 5-10 minutes.
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Aftermath of a Financial Crisis
Publication | 29 September 2009 | John Daley
Aftermath of a financial crisis. Annual finsia and MCFS Banking and Finance Conference.
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The Shann Memorial Lecture
Publication | 19 August 2009 | Saul Eslake
Saul Eslake delivers the Shann Memorial Lecture at the University of Western Australia - Aug 2009.
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