Australia has joined the global political trend towards greater wage regulation, with a recent campaign from the ACTU calling for a ‘living wage’. However, examining the predicted effects of such a change would reveal it to be based on misguided beliefs. Conor Yung explains.
Using economic models, Suvi Lokuge examines immigration policy and attempts to answer the age-old question – do immigrants steal jobs from native workers?
They say a person will have multiple different jobs in their career. But how easy is it to switch into a new role, a new workplace, a new industry? How feasible is to discard your current skills and learn something completely new? Taylor Nugent explores.
Chandon Hedge emphasises the importance of tertiary education despite increasing debt for university students.
March’s infographic looks at the employment disadvantage facing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.
Why would you raise the minimum wage? Chandan Hegde weighs in on the economic dilemma playing out in the U.S.
While reading fellow ESSA contributor Joey Moloney’s article I came across the under-consumption paradox. This was something that I had grappled with before in trying to reconcile the microeconomic lessons about price floors and the minimum wage with macroeconomic lessons about aggregate income and expenditure and the Keynesian Cross. It seems many other people have observed this contradiction before, including Karl Marx.
With the announcement for a proposed ‘boot camp’ for unemployed youth coming out of the Education and Employment Government ministries this week, youth unemployment policy looks set to be a major election issue this September.
Yet the ‘boot camp’ initiative has been overshadowed by a report published on Wednesday by Andrew Baker at the Centre of Independent Studies that accuses the Government of manipulating unemployment figures for political gain with serious macroeconomic consequences.
Hysteresis in the periphery
Recently, financial markets around the world have undergone a sharp correction in response to fears of an eventual tapering in the Federal Reserve’s Quantitative Easing program. The reaction was spurred by Ben Bernake’s, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, comments to the press that QE will be slowed if unemployment falls to 7% and inflation remains within their target. Cautiously this may be sooner than expected as the US economy is beginning to show sustained periods of healthy increases in employment growth.
However, the same cannot be said for the European Union. GDP in countries in the periphery continues to decline, with Italy suffering a 2.4% decline and Greece a 5.6% decline in the first quarter of 2013. Alarmingly it’s Italy’s worst recession in 20 years. With this persistently poor performance, comes the danger of hysteresis.
Yannis Goutzamanis discusses the effects that private equity has on the wider economy.
