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Australia has been the lucky country for a long time. First it rode off the sheep's back. Then it became a quarry for emerging economies. It deregulated its financial sector, abandoned manufacturing, rode an apparently endless urban-land boom, and has gone more than 25 years without a recession. But is Australia's luck about to run out? Brain and Manning, two of the country's highly experienced economic analysts, argue that Australia's prosperity has been bought by borrowing from its future — specifically, by borrowing too much, for the wrong assets, and from the wrong lenders. Using international and local indicators to measure economic danger signs, they warn that, if current policies are not altered, the country will be at extreme risk of an economic calamity. Due to Australia's high and increasing levels of household debt, foreign debt, and low foreign-exchange reserves, the country will enter what they call a Code Red zone. Once that happens, it is highly unlikely that Australia will be able to avoid, at best, a severe and prolonged recession, or, at worst, an economic catastrophe. Credit Code Red proposes alternative courses of action for the authorities to take, which involve reducing disposable incomes and imports, re-regulating the financial sector, and abandoning neo-liberal economic theory. It is a timely warning that what is politically unrealistic today may soon become too little, too late.

The paper investigates the economic effects of major product market reforms in some of the historically most protected non-manufacturing industries. It relies on a unique mapping between new annual data on reform shocks and sector-level outcomes for five network industries (electricity and gas, land transport, air transport, postal services, and telecommunications) in twenty-six countries spanning over three decades. The use of a threedimensional panel and careful instrumentation of reform shocks using external instruments enables us to control for economy-wide macroeconomic shocks and address possible sources of omitted variable bias more broadly. Using a local projection method, we find that major reductions in barriers to entry yield large increases in output and labor productivity over a five-year horizon, concomitant with a relative price decline. By contrast, there is only a weak positive effect on sectoral employment, and investment is essentially unaffected, suggesting that output gains from reform primarily reflect higher total factor productivity. It takes some time for these gains to materialize: effects become statistically significant two to three years after the reform, as prices start dropping, and productivity and output increase significantly. However, there is no evidence of any negative short-term cost from reform, including under weak macroeconomic conditions. These findings provide a clear case for intensifying product market reform efforts in advanced economies at the current juncture of weak growth.