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Economics
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September 2023
Profit-Price Inflation: Theory, International Evidence, and Policy Implications
New research confirms that corporate profits in Australia, despite recent moderation, remain well above historic norms, and must fall further in order to allow a rebuilding of real wages in Australia that have been badly damaged by recent inflation.
August 2022
Profit share
The roles of profits, wages and costs in driving inflation has been widely discussed in recent months. Claims by the Business Council of Australia that profit shares are at a 20-year low are not supported by official data sources.
July 2022
Are Wages or Profits Driving Australia’s Inflation?
Labour costs have played an insignificant role in the recent increase in inflation, accounting for just 15 percent of economy wide price increases while profits have played an overwhelming role, accounting for about 60 percent of recent inflation.
June 2021
Funding High-Quality Aged Care Services: A Summary
The Centre for Future Work has prepared a 4-page summary of our recent detailed report on funding needed improvements in aged care services in Australia, in the wake of recommendations from the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety.
May 2021
Funding High-Quality Aged Care Services
Implementing the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety will require additional Commonwealth funding of at least $10 billion per year, and there are several revenue tools which the government could use to raise those funds. While the Royal Commission’s 148 recommendations were not explicitly costed, the Centre’s report shows that
Missing a Stitch in Time:
Australia’s electricity industry constitutes a large and critical component of our national economic infrastructure. The industry produces $25 billion per year in value- added. It employs around 50,000 Australians, paying out $6 billion per year in wages and salaries. It makes $45 billion in annual purchases from a diverse and far-reaching supply chain, that provides the sector with inputs ranging from resources to equipment to construction to services.
November 2019
Tolerate Unemployment, but Blame the Unemployed
For the last generation macroeconomic policy in Australia has been based on the assumption that unemployment must be maintained at a certain minimum level in order to restrain wages and prevent an outbreak of accelerating inflation. Now, after six years of record-low wage growth – which weakened even further in the latest ABS wage statistics – it is time for that policy to be abandoned.
April 2018
Inquiry into the BCA Commitment to the Senate
The present submission questions the Business Council of Australia’s (BCA) Commitment to increasing investment, employment and wages in the event that the outstanding tax cuts are legislated. We looked specifically at the 10 corporate CEOs who made the commitment on behalf of their companies and found some half of those paid no tax. One wonders what their commitment could possibly mean.
March 2010
A licence to print money: Bank profits in Australia
Banks were portrayed as the villains of the global financial crisis; many of the big international banks and their executives were associated with greed and excessive risk-taking. Regulators were obliged to step in with unprecedented rescue packages to save the financial systems in the US, the UK and, to a lesser extent, the major European