Europe is in economic dire straits and the two most powerful economies on the continent are, at least on paper, led by individuals with considerable differences. The previous French President Nicolas Sarkozy…
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Obesity. Climate change. Brain drain. Tax havens. War in Afghanistan. All have been described as “wicked problems”. UC Berkeley scholars, Rittel and Webber, coined the term in 1973 when they were reacting…
Nations half the size of Australia spend more on scientific research, have higher employment levels for scientists, and greater appeal to foreign investors, according to a report on Australia’s global…
Ten days ago, the political landscape in Europe changed profoundly. Greece voted in the main to elect parties from the far right and far left who are opposed to austerity, and France elected a socialist…
The Australian dollar has touched below parity with the US dollar for the first time since December last year. This will no doubt disappoint the long line of Australian citizens touring the world, firms…
Are sustainability-dependent executive bonuses the answer to saving the planet? Research recently conducted by the Centre for Corporate Governance at the University of Technology, Sydney, examined whether…
Alcohol is a prime target for taxation. It’s a good source of government revenue; it allows governments to recoup costs for providing services to drinkers (such as accident and emergency care and policing…
It’s an old joke, but hard to resist around Budget time. That is, that economic forecasting was invented to make astrology look respectable. Over the past few days we’ve heard a lot about how notoriously…
The democratic executions of Nicolas Sarkozy in France and Lucas Papademos in Greece means the body count of European leaders guillotined by angry electorates has risen to 12. Sarkozy and Papademos join…
The content and tone of JP Morgan chief Jamie Dimon’s telephone call to analysts explaining JP Morgan Chase’s regulatory filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission reporting a $2 billion loss in…
In the lead-up to the federal government’s decision to delay the promised increase in the aid budget, a CARE Australia survey found strong public support for Australia’s international aid program. From…
In a widely anticipated forthcoming book, Edward Conard – a former Bain Capital colleague of Mitt Romney’s – has advanced the arguments that investment drives economic growth, and that deregulation and…
In Australia and many other countries, increases in the number of women in senior leadership roles within most corporations have been small and slow to occur. The underemployment and under-utilisation…
The Treasurer Wayne Swan has described the 2012 Budget yesterday as “a Labor budget to its bootstraps”, and commentators have variously seen it as “a big taxing, big spending budget, including a big increase…
Reporting on the federal budget has been replete with commentary about “cuts” to foreign aid. But the fact is that the aid program was not cut in any meaningful sense of the word. In nominal terms, aid…
The 2012 federal budget offers to return a modest surplus of $1.5 billion over the financial year 2012-2013, with the hope of further surplus budgets in the following years. In normal circumstances, this…
Government budgets are increasingly becoming more political documents. This has been particularly evident with the federal government’s pledge to return the budget to surplus. However, budget numbers are…
“Walk into the local pet shop and the resident galah will be talking about microeconomic reform.” So Paul Keating once famously quipped about the significance of the government’s microeconomic reform agenda…
The government has postponed its foreign aid target by a year as part of its 2012 Federal Budget, but has announced a raft of new measures to monitor the effectiveness of Australia’s aid programs. The…
Labor has made a $5 billion pitch to true-believers with a $1.5 billion surplus, cash hand-outs and tax breaks for low- and middle-income earners in the federal budget. And the opinion-makers are on the…
Good policy should be free of surprises. Households have to make decisions about how much to spend, how much to save, how to finance their retirement, whether to take out health insurance, and so on. Businesses…
In the last 24 hours, we have heard mutterings about the possibility that an earlier commitment to cuts in the corporate tax rate may not go ahead in the budget. Some in the business community have, unsurprisingly…
The 2012-13 budget has been the subject of an unusually intensive amount of media and sectoral speculation and debate in the past few weeks. This piece sets out what we should look for in tonight’s budget…
There is a scene in the film Beautiful People set in London during the 1993 Balkan war where a young female doctor brings home a recently arrived refugee to her conservative upper class family. There is…
Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan will be busy tonight handing down the Federal Budget with all the policy settings we’ll need to ensure Australia’s future prosperity (and not simply as a re-election platform…