The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) recently released its estimates for retail sales in December. Nominal retail sales fell 0.5% over the month after seasonal adjustments. This fall mostly reflects the transfer of pre-Christmas sales from the usual shopping peak…
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Inflation data was recently released for the last quarter of 2019, closing out the most recent decade of price changes. This Data Story illustrates how the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is composed and what goods and services have become more…
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As another decade of disappointingly slow growth in Australia draws to a close, policy makers, business leaders and many others are pondering what needs to happen before growth picks up to the old pre-GFC levels that we had come to…
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In 2019, (Un)Equal Pay Day will be on 28 August. This date is calculated by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) to mark the 59 additional days from the end of the previous financial year that women, on average, must…
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Young people in Australia experience higher levels of unemployment than the rest of the population. This is for a variety of reasons including a perceived or real lack of experience and skills, a mismatch between the supply and demand of…
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This week I am attending the OECD World Forum on ‘the Future of Well-Being: Statistics, Knowledge and Policy’, as a guest of the OECD. This year was the sixth annual World Forum but the first Forum at which private sector…
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Several myths about the Australian workforce are being widely circulated of late and discussed as if they were ‘facts’. One of these has been that ‘casualisation’ (that is, the incidence or proportion of casual work) is increasing in Australia. Quite…
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Heaven is high, and the Emperor is far away This is my favourite Chinese saying. It’s particularly useful when trying to placate a frustrated Ai Group member who can’t understand why the import documents she submitted successfully to Customs in…
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Reflections on the 19th round of RCEP negotiations Even the most casual observer of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) will recognise that there are member economies at very different stages of economic development. This is part of the challenge in…
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What happened to the dollar in July? The Australian dollar (AUD) has risen sharply against the US dollar (USD) during July 2017 (see chart 1). Indeed, the AUD is now nudging up to 80 US cents, for the first time…
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