The looming question for me and my partner is “where might we live as we grow older and frailer?” For us, the ideal place is likely to be a retirement village. But at what cost? (more…)
Category: Economy
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Global population growth is now slowing rapidly. Will a falling population be better for the environment?
Right now, human population growth is doing something long thought impossible – it’s wavering. It’s now possible global population could peak much earlier than expected, topping 10 billion in the 2060s. Then, it would begin to fall. (more…)
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Inequality is about more than just who has the money
Rising inequality in Australia needs a new understanding of how people live, not just economics. (more…)
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Managing the economy: sharpening a blunt instrument
Conceptually, managing the economy is simple: if inflation is rampant, suck money out; if recession is raging, pump money in. (more…)
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The end of Israel’s economy
As Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza continues unabated, the Israeli economy is facing a catastrophe. The physical destruction in Israel from the war has been minimal, but one thing has been destroyed: its future. (more…)
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Engaging Pillar 2 of AUKUS: losing self-respect and encouraging self-harm
Pillar 2 is a thing that AUKUS created: it appears at different times and with different meanings and possibilities and yet is not entirely, or even at all, predictable because the initial conditions and predicate logic on which it depends are themselves illusions or fabrications of the collective mind of those who constructed it in a national security strongroom to which only they have the keys. (more…)
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Australia, developing countries and the US clash over WTO electronic commerce rules
Despite ongoing debates about the need to regulate Big Tech companies Australia is sponsoring a deregulatory international agreement in the face of opposition from both the US and developing countries. (more…)
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Why organised crime puts its money on online gambling
Illegal online casinos are used by criminal gangs to launder billions in profit garnered from transnational crime. (more…)
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Data-driven, theory-averse research is fuelled by the rankings hamster wheel
Big data has contributed to a cultural shift towards evidence-based decision-making in academia, industry, and government, which prioritises empirical evidence over theory-based inquiry. It has also been associated with the boom in the publication of shorter journal articles and the decline in the publication of scholarly books, fuelled by the publish-or-perish academic rankings hamster wheel, writes John Howard. (more…)
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China and the US are facing parallel economic conundrums
Mutual economic quandaries as both try to reshape their economies may force the two bitter rivals to learn to live with each other again. (more…)
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How to fix poverty? Universal basic income
A single standard income payment, untaxed and unconditional to every person, will provide income security and the freedom to choose education, work and lifestyle. It would replace existing targeted welfare payments (not programs) and be integrated for administration purposes with the taxation system. Giving an equal payment to everyone would overcome poverty while boosting participation, skills, productivity and growth. (more…)
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Maybe only a recession will fix macroeconomic management
In the economy, as in life, it helps a lot if you learn from your mistakes. Or, if you’re in public life, from the mistakes of your predecessors. (more…)
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Shocking news: China is kicking more global goals
Is China mired in economic misery while bogged down by old habits- or very successfully developing its exceptional manufacturing prowess as it expands and consolidates its influence across the Global South (and well beyond)? Never mind any apparent contradiction, one leading global weekly answers yes and yes to these two questions. (more…)
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The cost of living crisis is really a housing crisis
The evidence shows that the only households whose living costs have risen faster than their incomes are those homeowners with a mortgage. For the other two thirds of households, their incomes have risen faster than their living costs. Policy should therefore focus on why mortgage costs have risen so dramatically. (more…)
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Mood now upbeat in Australia, but downbeat in America – Monthly economic and market review
Two news items last week completely reversed the economic outlooks in Australia and America. (more…)
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Panic as Japan stocks take biggest dive since Black Monday, 1987
If it was panic last Friday, the Asahi Shimbun declared when the stock market fell more than 2,200 points, or 5.8 percent. It was double panic by this afternoon (Monday) when the market fell even more, by 3,800 points to the 31,000 mark. (more…)
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Australia’s economic security depends crucially on working with Asia
Australia has unveiled a new National Interest Framework which integrates security considerations into domestic economic policy, aiming to secure economic resilience and security amidst changing global power structures and increasing geopolitical tensions. But Australia has not yet placed strategic economic diplomacy at the forefront of the framework. Managing Australia’s security environment requires emphasising the importance of maintaining reliable international and domestic supply chains, managing foreign investment, and adapting to significant influences such as rising powers like China and the accelerating impacts of climate change. (more…)
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Steady as she goes
China’s Third Plenum consolidated the significant changes in policy direction foreshadowed in previous quietly implemented policy designed to progress towards the goal of common prosperity. (more…)
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War in a hot climate: the luxury of AUKUS in a time of global overheating
The Roman emperor Nero was a horrible, horrible man, as Donald Trump might put it. His murderous reign of terror has certainly earned him a place in the history books, but the only thing most people believe about him is certainly false: that he played the fiddle while Rome burned. He may have strummed his cithara while the conflagration raged, but even this much is uncertain. (more…)
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How economic bureaucrats make policies and remake the Chinese state
Yingyao Wang opens the black box of the Chinese bureaucracy to reveal the agency of the men and women who designed and redesigned Chinese economic policy. (more…)
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China: the global trading giant
An extraordinary chart from The Pioneer below compares nations whose largest trading partner was either the USA or China in the year 2000 and the year 2020. Over one short decade, it is a powerful visualisation of how the world’s economic centre shifted. (more…)
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China forges its own path at Third Plenum as West, thwarted by special interests, proves fundamentally incapable of reform
“In the Chinese context, there are a lot of talks about remembering your original mission. The original mission is to eliminate inequality” – Wang Dan, chief economist of Hang Seng Bank China.
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Bad banks, culpable coal industry, compliant government all in bed together
A People’s Development Bank would be appropriate to the needs and security of production in rural and regional Australia. The case for action is overwhelming and has been so since the Commonwealth Bank Australia (CBA) was privatised. Crucially the rural sector must lead the charge for Australia to retain our life support systems. (more…)
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Beyond the stockade – is Australia ready for US isolationism?
A Republican administration under Donald Trump would bring a fundamental change to America’s engagement with the world, necessitating a radical reassessment and reformulation of Australia’s foreign, trade, and defence policies. Falling back on the faithful ally tactic would not suffice to buffer the prosperity and security of Australians. (more…)
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Overproduction is OK as long as it’s done by anyone except China
It makes sense for Beijing to expand the services sector, but none for the US to transfer higher productivity in services to lower one in manufacturing. (more…)
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Loss of empire, loss of lucidity
As the United States’ imperial system and Western hegemony circles the drain, lucid thought is becoming a rare commodity. But there is hope.
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Silos are for grain, not for National policies
One of the characteristic features of modern western democracies is, as John Ralston Saul has pointed out, that it has focused on the development of narrow forms of expertise and then used reason to apply that narrow expertise to addressing specific social, cultural, economic and political issues. This is particularly true of the proliferating management elites produced by the also proliferating Business Schools in Universities across the West. (more…)
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Developing nations suffer for rich world’s climate complacency
If leading central banks can grow their balance sheets by billions of dollars during the pandemic, they can do the same to fight global warming. (more…)
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Crisis in the West, opportunity for the rest?
Whether we call it “polycrisis,” like Columbia University Professor Adam Tooze, or “the age of catastrophe,” like the distinguished Marxist Alex Callinicos, there is no doubt that we are living in a period where the very foundations of the contemporary world order are cracking. There is that enigmatic line Gramsci used to describe his era that is also appropriate for ours: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” (more…)
