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Byline: Richard O. Sinnott, Abstract Rapid urban growth is occurring across Australia. This has implications for planning and management of cities. Data is key to tackling this. Hitherto, an extensive range of organisations has held the data for Australian cities, crossing government, industry and academia. With the growing demand for open data and capabilities to support big data analytics, new opportunities now exist to rectify this situation. The Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) project has been funded to provide seamless, secure access to data from definitive organisations of Australia. We describe the AURIN platform; it's data, together with a representative big data case study. Article Note: Department of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010 Australia. Corresponding author: Sinnott, email rsinnott@unimelb.edu.au. The AURIN technical team includes Christopher Bayliss, Andrew Bromage, Gerson Galang, Philip Greenwood, Dr Glenn Tesla Jayaputera, Davis Mota Marques Luca Morandini, Ghazal Nogoorani, Dr Hossein Pursultani, Muhammad Sarwar, Dr William Voorsluys and Dr Ivo Widjaja. The AURIN project is funded through the Australian Education Investment Fund SuperScience initiative. We gratefully acknowledge their support and the broader network of AURIN collaborators.

Byline: Nicholas Reece Abstract Prime Minister Julia Gillard released the 'Australia in the Asian Century' White Paper in October 2012, describing it as 'a roadmap showing how Australia can be a winner in the Asian Century'. This article provides a review of Australia's progress on engagement with Asia 2 years after the White Paper. It covers the political and performance status of key Asia-related initiatives following the election of the Abbott government. It finds a high level of continuity and support for individual policies and objectives in the White Paper. However, there have been some significant changes in policy, emphasis and approach and emerging areas of underperformance. Article Note: Centre for Public Policy, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010 Australia; email < Nicholas.reece@unimelb.edu.au.

Early childhood investment decisions represent critical policy frameworks that ideally reflect a strong evidence base. This review seeks to assess early childhood intervention priorities based on return on investment without limitation by health, education or social science sector. A systematic search of peer‐reviewed literature identified 858 eligible papers relating to economic evaluations of intervention in early childhood (0–4 years). Data for this narrative review was provided by 34 papers. The capacity to rank interventions and to compare relevance across disciplines is limited by the degree of heterogeneity across studies and the potential to compare published studies based on journal indices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I outline the reasons why the choice of PhD research topic has important and persistent effects on an economist' s career. Although the issues raised in this article are most acute for those wishing to pursue a career in academia, there are also implications for those working outside academia. While there are many factors that determine whether an economist has a successful career, I argue that the choice of PhD topic is an issue, which deserves more attention. Although primarily targeted at PhD students, the issues raised here resonate throughout an economist' s career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a reflection on the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. This panel dataset produced over 300 journal articles, about 30 books and book chapters and multiple public reports and working papers in 10 years. The survey covers the population's labor force, health status, income and family structures. The Commonwealth Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs created the HILDA Survey in 2000.

This article summarises the academic contributions presented and discussed during the 2016 edition of the Melbourne Institute Macroeconomic Policy Meetings, which focused on the role played by uncertainty for a number of countries' business cycle. Considerations on the interaction between uncertainty and financial frictions, the global dimension of uncertainty, uncertainty shocks in times of unconventional monetary policy and the imperfect knowledge that agents have over policy targets are among the discussions entertained in this article. The main insights coming from those papers are connected with the extant literature and directions for future research are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many countries have initiated structural reforms in corporate income tax (CIT) to attract investment and promote growth. There has been a continuous decline in CIT rates worldwide. It is expected that cuts in CIT rates may increase after‐tax profits and encourage investment. A change in the CIT rate may also be shifted backward (by changing salaries and wages) and/or forward (by changing product prices). These are theoretical possibilities and may not have support from empirical evidence. In this paper we review empirical studies to assess the impact of CIT rate changes on the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assesses the Australian Green Paper entitled 'Restoring Full Employment,' released by the Australian Committee on Employment Opportunities in December 1983. Determinants of the economic growth rate; Relation between economic growth and unemployment rates; Use of the Access Economics Model to predict changes in the unemployment rates.

Presents a bibliography of Australian and New Zealand working papers in the fields of economics, management and accounting that were released during the period November 1, 1990 to April 15, 1991. 'Systematic Patterns in the Residual Plots of Short-Panel Regression Models,' by Chris M. Alaouze; 'Social Loss Approach to Testing the Efficiency of Australian Financial Futures,' by Robert D. Brooks.

Lists several Australian and New Zealand working papers and research reports, released during the period October 16, 1987 to February 15, 1988, in economics, management and accounting. Database source of the lists; Availability of the lists on inter-library loan from the Giblin Library.

This article analyses ongoing changes in the supply of alternative media of payments (MOPs). The comparison between old (cash and deposits) and new (cryptocurrencies and central bank digital currencies) MOPs is based on a novel definition of money where a MOP has three properties: the first two are the standard functions of medium of exchange (liquidity costs) and store of value (opportunity costs) and the third is the novel function of store of information (privacy costs). Given such properties and that the evolution of the different MOPs likely depends on individual preferences, the relevance of experimental economics is highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here we highlight a neglected contribution of Alexander Sutherland (1852-1902) to Australian health economics. Sutherland read a paper on health insurance at the Melbourne Social Science Congress that was organised in the context of the International Exhibition of 1880-1881. He proposed combining life and health insurance into a single product and to require those who are insured to obtain regular medical check-ups. The aim was to provide the insurer with information on the behaviours of the insured and to promote healthy lifestyles. These proposals were not well received at the time and have been largely forgotten, but may be relevant today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Queensland Family Cohort Pilot Study follows 450 women over the course of their pregnancy and after giving birth, collecting a wealth of information on socioeconomic characteristics, health, healthcare use and biological samples. The focus of this paper is to demonstrate how these data may be used to measure inequality of opportunity, between advantaged and disadvantaged populations, for mothers, partners and babies, in terms of their mental health and use of scarce health care resources. This paper provides the foundation for future analyses when a wider Queensland study is proposed to collect data from 12,500 families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How large is Australia's fiscal space? Blanchard (2019) shows that as long as the real interest rate R $R$ is below the real growth rate G $G$, a government can sustain a positive primary deficit with a constant (or even declining) ratio of public debt to GDP. In this article, we explain the neutral real interest rate and the reasons for its decline. Then, we discuss the results of a companion paper, Domínguez and Quiggin (2022), in which we quantify the fiscal space for Australia and find that a permanent increase in the primary deficit can be afforded up to reaching a debt to GDP ratio of 79 per cent. Furthermore, this so‐called 'free lunch' in the fiscal space can be expanded if debt is used to finance public investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an original estimation of the size of the ground‐rent appropriated by competing social subjects in the Australian economy over the long term, and of several economic variables necessary to accomplish that measurement. The paper also assesses the relative importance of ground‐rent in total surplus‐value and the Australian process of capital accumulation, finding that it constitutes a significant portion. Finally, the paper estimates the determinants of the ground‐rent yielded by mining lands used to produced iron ore and mineral coal during the recent 'commodities price boom', stressing the importance of the location factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents new information about the post‐graduation activities of those with a PhD in economics and finance from an Australian university. Approximately 40 per cent have an academic job, while the other 60 per cent work elsewhere or engage in other activities. The analysis includes origin‒destination networks for both the academic and non‐academic markets, the determinants of earnings and measures of overqualification and underemployment. The findings of the paper can provide guidance for those completing or contemplating PhD studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a guide for economists on research manuscript publication. Research work is mostly published in books and refereed journals. While book editors are looking for content that will sell, journal editors seek articles that have new and worthwhile information. The most important rule for economists to understand is that an article can be sent to only one journal at a time. Book manuscripts can be sent to many publishers at the same time. Advice is offered on dealing with rejection when an article submitted to a journal is flatly rejected. Rejections are more common in economics journals that other disciplines and many famous economics articles were rejected by several journals before being published.

Australia has a long‐standing dependence on foreign investment to make up the difference between domestic saving and investment opportunities. There is, nevertheless, an ongoing debate about the merits or otherwise of inward foreign investment. There has also been a recent tightening of criteria governing foreign investment. The OECD assesses Australia's foreign direct investment regime to be one of the most restrictive in the OECD area, while broader discussions have considered the potential for a decline in Australia's credit rating. This paper uses a dynamic global general equilibrium model—GDyn‐FS—to report on the national and sectoral effects of a decline in the desirability of investing in Australia, relative to other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three years into the COVID‐19 pandemic, this article considers the longer‐lasting economic impacts on the Australian workforce through a gender lens. Using Australian Bureau of Statistics data, it analyses changes in employment, earnings and educational participation relative to the pre‐pandemic trends that were predicted to have otherwise occurred. Despite women's employment moving back towards pre‐pandemic levels more rapidly than men's, the pandemic also saw a widening of the gender gap in earnings and a larger fall in women's educational participation. This paper highlights the need for ongoing monitoring of labour market indicators through a gender lens to inform more responsive policy design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a brief guide for students undertaking their first piece of research. The activity of research itself and the closely related process of writing a research report or thesis are so different from the standard work of students, that it is helpful to set down explicitly some of those things that experienced researchers often take for granted. It might be useful to refer to this article at regular intervals during the production of your research paper. This article aims only to provide some brief practical suggestions for organizing the writing and giving a research paper the appropriate shape or appearance.

In Australia there is limited understanding of the scale and nature of energy hardship or poverty. Energy poverty remains a concept with no clear definition and therefore no clear objectives, targets, metrics for data collection nor institutions to monitor and report on. Europe, in the last decade, has gone from limited public recognition of, and policy action on, energy poverty, to now having sophisticated quantitative measurement and monitoring tools, and institutional governance arrangements that promote transparency and accountability. In this paper, drawing on the European experience, we focus attention upon the measures and indicators of energy poverty and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. We propose institutional options for understanding and tackling these problems in the context of Australia's energy transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper investigates whether the exchange rate asymmetrically influences domestic investment in China. To this end, the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) process is applied to investment data disaggregated by China's 31 provinces. We discover that there is evidence that the ups and downs of the yuan have asymmetric impacts on domestic investment for some provinces, though not all, in both the long‐ and short‐run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper examines trends in gender inequalities in unpaid domestic and care work over the short‐ and long‐term in Australia, including assessing the impact of the COVID‐19 lockdowns. We use the concept of time—historical, biographical and transitional—as a framework for our analyses. Drawing on data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, we find wide and continuing gender gaps in unpaid work over the past two decades. We demonstrate that parenthood is a far greater producer and exacerbator of gender inequalities in unpaid domestic and care work than COVID‐19 lockdowns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the association between pre‐recorded evidence and court outcomes in cases of domestic violence. Net of controls and time fixed effects, we find that cases with pre‐recorded evidence are 3.4 percentage points more likely to result in a conviction. This increase occurs through three channels: a 5.6 percentage point increase in the probability of a conviction among (the one in four) cases that proceed to a defended hearing; a 2.4 percentage point increase in the probability of a guilty plea; and, a 2.4 percentage point decrease in the probability that the prosecution withdraws their case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Max Corden and Ross Garnaut published 'The Economic Consequences of Mr Trump' in this journal in 2018. This paper examines what has transpired in the US economy against that article. It notes continuity in budget and trade policy from the Trump Presidency to the Biden Presidency. The continuity in macro‐fiscal and trade policies is accompanied by a significant departure in the focus of fiscal expansion: Mr Biden's strong support for decarbonisation. The article applies Max Corden's approach to international economics to the question: should Australia emulate Mr Biden's combination of budget, protection and decarbonisation policies? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides some introductory information about archives of macroeconomic time series, archives of working papers, econometric software and other resources available on the World Wide Web. Sources of time series data on the Internet; Information on working paper archives, single subject pages and on-line journals; Econometric resources on the World Wide Web.

There is a growing need to gauge local economic activity in real time. Localised economic challenges have been emphasised in the wake of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Real‐time trackers (such as OECD trackers) and other nowcasting applications typically correspond to national or highly aggregated regions. In this discussion paper, we briefly explore how unconventional data might be used to produce nowcasts of local economies. We argue that in the absence of traditional nowcasting metrics, efforts to nowcast local economies need a local perspective, with data capture tailored to address heterogeneity across three domains: (1) resources, (2) people and (3) life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four key issues arising from the Johnson paper relating to ongoing reform of Australia's health sector are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview of research into the phenomenon of whether climatic factors, such as temperature and weather‐related disasters, affect the decision to migrate. As an example, we examine migration flows from 198 countries to Australia for the time span from 1980 to 2015. Our results show that temperature does not have a robust, significant effect on migration flows, while weather‐related disasters do significantly affect flows to Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops two state‐of‐the‐art uncertainty indices for New Zealand by exploiting two separate data‐rich environments. The first index follows the methodology outlined in Jurado, Ludvigson and Ng (2015) to construct an estimate of uncertainty based on a large New Zealand macro dataset. The second index is constructed based on freely accessible and real time Google Trends data to provide a real‐time and freely‐accessible measure of uncertainty as in Castelnuovo and Tran (2017) and Shields and Tran (2018). Both indices do a reasonable job measuring uncertainty in New Zealand. VAR evidence documents significant impacts of uncertainty shocks on GDP in New Zealand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic saw governments around the world suddenly accumulate substantially higher levels of public debt. We consider the level of debt entered into by Australia's federal, state and territory governments and compare this against three metrics for debt sustainability. Using these measures, we find that current and future public debt levels sit within what is regarded as sustainable by scholarly and practitioner opinion. However, we note that recent increases in interest rates will challenge this. We conclude by outlining a range of economic, social and policy challenges arising from the new high public debt environment. Article Note: Zwalf: Monash University, Australia; Scott: Parliament of Victoria, Australia. Corresponding author: Sebastian Zwalf, email: sebastian.zwalf@monash.edu.au The authors wish to acknowledge Adjunct Professor Graeme Hodge, Associate Professor Paul Strangio and Emeritus Professor David Hayward for their generous feedback and assistance with this paper's early drafts. We also extend thanks to Professor Ian McDonald, the Australian Economic Review and an anonymous reviewer for their support and feedback. The paper is substantially improved for all feedback received. We also thank Ms Eva Maree Zwalf and Mr Lucas Wu Peng Scott for typographic and presentation assistance. Byline: Sebastian Zwalf, Robin Scott

This article discusses recent research on the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy—the theme of the 2018 edition of the Melbourne Institute Macroeconomic Policy Meeting. We review recent research findings on the effects of fiscal multipliers in normal times, during booms/busts, and in the presence of the zero lower bound. Studies on the effects of fiscal policy in open economy settings as well as contributions on the fiscal‐monetary policy mix are also considered. We conclude by outlining a few research avenues that are particularly relevant from a policy standpoint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lists technical papers on social and economic issues in Australia published by the Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research.

Lists technical papers published by the Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research as of September 1980. Titles; Authors; Number of pages.

Lists the technical papers, released as of December 1978, by members of the Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research in Australia.

Presents a list of research reports for the information of specialists in particular fields that are published by the Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research as Technical Papers, compiled as of September 1978. Titles; Authors; Number of pages; Recommended prices.