Treasurer Swan’s commitment to bring the government budget into surplus in 2012-13 may be a political imperative, but is not good economics. The focus for prudential fiscal management should instead be…

The recent economic forecasts of the IMF and OECD about prospects for economic growth remind me of an aphorism about the economist who drowned while crossing a river he estimated that was, on average…

Monetary policymaking is imperfect. When board members of a central bank such as the Reserve Bank of Australia sit down to set the appropriate target cash rate each month – as they did this week – there…

These days, most economic commentators in Australia sing from the same hymn sheet when it comes to discussing our economic prospects: while the ongoing gloom in the US and the outright deterioration in…

For over 200 years, since the industrial revolution, we have seen economic growth strongly coupled with the consumption of more and more resources. The more we grew, the more we consumed. This model works…

While global warming deniers have been effective in their aim of sowing doubt in the public mind, the most powerful argument used over and over has been that cutting emissions will cut growth, and that…