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This paper examines the nexus between excess currency growth and inflation in Australia. It first canvasses the operation of monetary policy. Using different econometric techniques, it next examines how well excess money supply growth, measured in terms of currency and M3, explains Australia's inflation over the long term from 1970–2015, and then more specifically before and after the adoption of inflation targeting. Its key result is that excess money growth has been the main determinant of Australia's inflation, although became less important during the inflation targeting era. This implies the velocity of currency, the sine qua non of the Quantity Theory of Money, has been remarkably stable. Given the role excess currency plays in generating Australian inflation, it should be afforded greater prominence in monetary policy deliberations.

This paper proposes a new measure of competitiveness based on the ratio of non-tradable goods and services prices to tradable goods and services prices. It first presents a straightforward framework for understanding how key macroeconomic variables determine this alternative competitiveness measure with reference to output and expenditure behaviour in a two sector open economy. It then econometrically examines its most significant determinants with reference to private and public sector consumption and investment in Australia. Results based on quarterly data from 1998 to 2013 suggest that government expenditure on non-tradable goods and services was the most significant factor to worsen Australia's competitiveness. This provides an alternative perspective on the efficacy of fiscal policy to those previously advanced in standard international macroeconomic models.

We study a political economy model which aims to understand the diversity in the growth and technology-adoption experiences in different economies. In this model the cost of technology adoption is endogenous and varies across heterogeneous agents. Agents in the model vote on the proportion of revenues allocated towards such expenditures. In the early stages of development, the political-economy outcome of the model ensures that a sub-optimal proportion of government revenue is used to finance adoption-cost reducing expenditures. This sub-optimality is due to the presence of inequality; agents at the lower end of the distribution favor a larger amount of revenue allocated towards redistribution in the form of lump-sum transfers. Eventually all individuals make the switch to the better technology and their incomes converge. The outcomes of the model therefore explain why public choice is more likely to be conservative in nature; it represents the majority choice given conflicting preferences among agents. Consequently, the transition path towards growth and technology adoption varies across countries depending on initial levels of inequality.

In this paper we examine the dynamics of the link between inequality and inflation from a political economy perspective. We consider a simple dynamic general equilibrium model in which agents vote over the desired inflation rate in each period, and inequality is persistent. Inflation in our model is a mechanism of redistribution, and we find that the link between inequality and inflation within any period or over time depends on institutional and preference related parameters. Furthermore, we find that differences in the initial distributions of wealth can yield a diverse set of patterns for the evolution of the inflation and inequality link. Relative to existing literature, our model leads to more precise predictions about the inflation–inequality correlation. To that end, results in the extant empirical literature on the inflation and inequality link need to be interpreted with caution.