The National Accounts released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics confirmed Australia has entered its first recession in 29 years. But how does Australia’s economic performance compare with other countries?
The COVID-19 crisis has had severe impacts on the domestic and global economies, and it has unleashed a plethora of suggestions about how Australia can return to pre-COVID-19 times when we were setting world records for the longevity of our…
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The OECD recently updated its comparison of global minimum wages for all countries that have a national minimum wage. In 2019, Australia overtook Luxembourg as having the highest minimum wage in the world. In the previous year’s comparison, Australia had…
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The JobKeeper wage payment scheme was introduced to help Australian businesses survive activity restrictions that have been introduced in response the COVID-19 pandemic that began to affect Australia through March 2020. It is a payment made to eligible businesses and…
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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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