South Africa’s government should urgently announce a moratorium on civil service employment growth. The country has reached its upper limit in the number of civil servants that can be sustained.
Volatility is not going away any time soon, and if the US Fed decision plays the wrong way on the Australian dollar, our central bank could soon be back in the jawboning business.
The biggest factor behind the recessionary trend is not the Chinese market, austerity budgets, or even the threat of higher US interest rates this year.
Observers may be quick to declare social trends “good” or “bad” for families, but such conclusions are rarely justified. What’s good for one family – or group of families – may be bad for another. And…
The long and slow-stunted recovery of the eurozone economies is a major source of concern for the IMF and international bankers. Six years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers signalled the onset of the…
Bognor or Borneo? Penzance or Paris? Scarborough or Sao Paulo? The decision of whether to spend your annual leave holidaying in a foreign clime, at a campsite in the UK, or even just in your back garden…
What are the risks in the economic outlook for Australia? Typically, prognosticators take a scenario-based (aka “story-telling”) approach to answering this sort of question. And usually these scenarios…
In a new report, Working For The Few, Oxfam warns that the fight against poverty cannot be won until wealth inequality has been tackled. The wealth of the richest 1% in the world amounts to $110 trillion…
The creative industries have not only survived, but also thrived, in the recession, according to data released by the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport. This may come as a shock. The report details…
The global crash of 2008 kicked off a furious debate in the UK about whether or not the City of London is a real asset to the economy. There was huge anger about the multi-billion bail-out of failed banks…
In recent weeks there has been a spate of good economic news emanating from Ireland. The most significant was that in the latest 12-month period, employment increased by around 3%, an exceptional and surprising…
George Osborne promised Britain a “march of the makers” – but as yet, there is little sign that a resurgence of manufacturing is helping the economy to rebalance. It would be naïve to assume that manufacturing…
Welcome to part two of our interview with Dr Ken Henry, the latest in our series of video collaborations with SBS. In the first part of his interview with SBS business business journalist Ricardo Gonsalves…
We are now five years into the largest financial crisis in decades and yet, paradoxically, people don’t seem to be more unhappy than they were before. The UK ranked 10th of the countries surveyed for the…
In September 2008 the sudden collapse of the investment banking sector in the US would propel much of the world - especially Western economies - into the worst economic recession since the Great Depression…