Industrial relations reforms, part 2

John Quiggin55 Comments

I worked more on the Industrial Relations reform issue last night and I have written a draft paper, which you can read and, hopefully, comment on.

IR is a very complex topic, and for that reason I’ve tended to shy away from detailed analysis in the past. But with major changes inevitable, there’s no alternative but to get immersed in the details. This is going to be a slow process, but at least I’ve now made a start. I’m pretty much flat-out at present, so progress on this is likely to be slow.

Anyway, you can read my analysis, for what it’s worth (PDF file over the fold).
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IR reform and inequality

John Quiggin43 Comments

The National Tertiary Education Union, of which I’m a member, has nominated today as a day of protest against the government’s Industrial Relations reforms, but has left it up to members how to make their protest. For me, the obvious thing to do is to get to work on my long-promised analysis. I’ve written most of a draft, and I hope to get the rest done this evening, but in the meantime, I thought I’d give a short statement of how I see the relationship between industrial relations institutions and inequality, which is my central concern.
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Water again

John Quiggin

While I’m on the topic, my Fin column last week was about the National Water Initiative, which is in danger of becoming collateral damage in the fights between the Federal government and the states. It’s over the page.
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Rice and water

John Quiggin29 Comments

A couple of people have suggested that I should comment on some stories in the Australian about water and the rice industry. Since I’m busy, along with the RSMG team, working on models of this very topic (for all irrigated industries, not just rice), I’m happy to oblige.

The first, by Amanda Hodge and Matthew Denholm, presents a fairly negative view of the rice industry as a profligate user of water, and the second, by Laurie Arthur, is a response from the industry. A lot of interest focuses on the amount of water used to produce a kilogram of rice. In the original article, this was erroneously reported as 21 000 litres: the correct figure is about 2000 litres/kg, or 2Ml/tonne which is still a lot of water[1].
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How long can this go on ?

John Quiggin25 Comments

Another huge current account deficit, coming in at around 7.2 per cent of GDP. And that’s with high commodity prices and low world interest rates, thanks to the ‘global savings glut’. Put commodity prices back to normal, and interest rates up by a couple of percentage points, and we could easily be running a deficit in excess of 10 per cent of GDP. At that rate, net overseas obligations would be in excess of 100 per cent of GDP within five years.

Australia has been called a miracle economy on the strength of an impressively long, but by no means unique, economic expansion. But if we manage sustain this kind of imbalance for another five years it really will be a miracle. As far as I know, no economy has ever managed anything like it.

Effective average tax rates

John Quiggin17 Comments

An anonymous reader has sent me some interesting charts on average tax rates. The first shows the average income tax rate for a single person, taking into account the Medicare levy and the low income tax offset. The average tax rate rises with income as you’d expect but much more slowly than the marginal tax rates

The second takes into account the withdrawal of social security benefits, to compute an effective average tax rate, where the denominator is private income+maximum transfer payments and the numerator is tax paid+benefits withdrawn. The third does the same for a couple with one child. These average tax rates peak at a fortnightly income of about $500 for a single person and $1000 for a couple, and are otherwise fairly flat.

The pics are attached over the fold

Update Sorry, all that there are some problems with these pics. I’ll try and fix them ASAP.

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Why bother reading the papers?

John Quiggin21 Comments

Jack Strocchi points me to this piece by Tony Parkinson in the Age, which tries to score some points on the number of deaths caused by the Iraq war. Not only does Parkinson get nearly every point in the debate wrong (he misdescribes confidence intervals, fails to note that the UN study he’s touting covered only the first year of the war, ignores the difference between direct war casualties and “excess deaths” and so on) but he’s presenting as news an issue that was covered exhaustively in blogs weeks ago (you can start here and work back. As usual Tim Lambert does the heavy lifting. For a review of the earlier debate, see Daniel Davies at CT. For a more defensible version of the case Parkinson is trying to make, go here.)

I think we can add this to the list of issues where you’re better off getting your information from blogs than from the “quality” press.