Peter Martin, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University
Former treasury boss Ken Henry has fessed up to helping dumb down debates about tax and budgets to lists of winners and losers. He says what matters is what wins rather than who.
From an economic viewpoint, the idea may initially appeal by appearing to maximise the economic utility of the receiver. But it suffers from fundamental flaws.
When economists model climate impacts, they look to what past weather shocks have done to the economy. But this does not remotely capture what climate change could do.
It’s the question still hanging over Brisbane’s 2032 Olympics, which made Victoria cancel its Commonwealth Games: do such mega events pay their own way? The evidence suggests they’re unlikely to.
Jakub Hlávka, University of Southern California and Adam Rose, University of Southern California
Workplace absences, along with sales lost due to the cessation of brick-and-mortar retail shopping, airline travel and public gatherings, contributed the most.
Reducing greenhouse gases is expensive, but it’s a great investment compared to the damage we can expect to the Canadian economy if the climate warms 5 C by 2100.
Matthew E. Kahn, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Human behaviors shift. Policies change. New technology arrives and evolves. All those changes and more are hard to predict, and they affect tomorrow’s costs.
As countries get ready to re-open their economies, will there be a post-pandemic recovery? History and current economic models suggest those looking for a quick rebound will be disappointed.
Billions of taxpayer dollars are committed before all the evidence for, and against, infrastructure projects is in. As well as missing business cases, basic rules of economic modelling are broken.
A recent study was reported as saying a sugar tax would have us drinking more alcohol. But the study didn’t establish this fact. The results were mixed with no evidence one thing caused another.
Treasury modelling suggests that limiting negative gearing will lead to small change in prices. But behavioural economics shows it all depends on how the policy is framed.