The Impact of Children on the Lifetime Earnings of Australian Women: Evidence from the 1990s

This article presents estimates of the consequences of having children for the lifetime earnings of Australian women in the late 1990s.     

The Impact of a Disorderly Resolution of Global Imbalances on Global Wealth

Partly reflecting structural advantages such as liquidity and strong investor protection, foreigners have built up extremely large positions in US (as well as other dollar‐denominated) financial assets. This paper describes the impact on global wealth of an unanticipated shock to US financial markets. For every 10 per cent decline in the dollar, US equity markets, and US bond markets, total wealth losses to foreigners could amount to about 5 percentage points of foreign GDP. Four stylized facts emerge: (i) foreign countries, particularly emerging markets, are more exposed to US bonds than to US equities; (ii) over time US exposure has increased for most countries; (iii) on average, US asset holdings of developed countries and emerging markets (scaled by GDP) are very similar; and (iv) based on their reserves position alone, wealth losses of emerging market governments could on average amount to about 2¾ percentage points of their GDP.     

主权财富基金对国际金融体系的影响

经过50多年的发展,主权财富基全(SWF)已发展为全球金融市场的一股重要力量.从规模数据上来看,目前全球主权财富基金已经超过了对冲基金,达3万亿美元.考虑到大多数主权财富基金的经营管理并不公开,而且还在一定程度上反映了国家的主权意志,其在全球范围内的投资行为必将对国际金融体系形成巨大影响.文章就此进行了简要的分析.     

国民财富的积累与流失:基于能值视角的探讨

从重商主义财富论、国富论到劳动价值论、市场价值论、能量价值论,它们理论中关于衡量世界财富的标准都存在这样或那样的缺陷,笔者认为太阳能值财富理论在真正意义上找到了衡量世界财富的尺度。由于美国能值货币比率明显低于世界平均水平,故美国在与大部分国家的进出口贸易中处于有利地位,每年获得的超额利润达3904亿美元。美国是通过资源出口国的贡献来支撑其生产率的增长与其高消费格局的。2006年全年我国大陆能值财富流失超过5.35×1024sej,能值-货币价值为8425.2亿美元。为了减少我国外贸能值财富的流失和外汇储备的缩水,笔者提出了四点对策。     

The Impact of Inheritance on the Distribution of Wealth: Evidence from Great Britain

Using the British Household Panel Survey, we investigate the role of inheritance in shaping the distribution of household wealth in Great Britain during 1995–2005a period characterized by a substantial increase in wealth and an equally important decrease in wealth inequality. Abstracting from behavioral effects, we find that inheritances received during this period accounted for 30 percent of the increase in wealth of inheritors. Regression estimates of the effect of inheritance on wealth accumulation suggest that households spend 30 percent of their inheritances on average, and that there is substantial heterogeneity in household responses. Households that accumulated more wealth saved a larger share of their inheritances, as did middle aged households and those with lower initial wealth. Although inheritances are highly unequal they had a small impact on overall wealth inequality. This mainly reflected the fact that their size relative to other sources of wealth was very small.     

家庭风险态度对房地产财富效应的影响

本文首次研究了家庭风险态度对我国房地产财富效应的影响.基于家庭微观调查数据的研究结果表明:经济社会生活中的不确定性会提高家庭风险厌恶程度;而家庭风险态度对房地产财富效应产生了显著影响,住房财富对消费的影响随着风险厌恶程度的增大而减弱,较高的风险厌恶程度显著削弱了正向的房地产财富效应.这一结论可以为房地产财富效应与微观主体行为特征间的关系研究提供更多依据,并且预示着提高各项政策的持续性以降低居民面临的不确定性,可以有效提升房地产正向财富效应,进一步促进居民消费影响.     

The Impact of International Trade and Protection on Australian Manufacturing Employment

The labour market consequences of trade and protection have only recently come under the scrutiny of labour economists. This paper seeks to accomplish two things - to survey the recent research and to provide estimates of the effect that reductions in effective rates of assistance afforded to Australia's manufacturing industries have had on employment. Recent labour market developments reveal a downward trend in manufacturing employment levels. The declines appear to have been associated with lower levels of assistance. However, the estimates of the effect of lower levels of protection are generally small - about a one per cent reduction in employment for each ten per cent reduction in the effective rate of industry assistance. In addition, the manufacturing employment developments appear to be only weakly linked to real wage resistance. Overall, an overriding impression from the find ings presented in this paper is the strength of the structural adjustments ongoing in Australia     

The Impact of Technical Change and Profit on Investment in Australian Manufacturing

This paper combines W.E.G. Salter's analysis of capital-embodied technical change with Kalecki's analysis of financing investment from retained profits to provide a Post Keynesian model of investment with process innovation, which is applied to data from Australian manufacturing industries. The approach to process innovation taken in this study is to identify new capital stock introduced through physical investment, which results in the older vintage stock being decommissioned as technologically obsolete. In the estimated model, the profit factor is used as a measure of the ability to invest, and the rate of labour productivity growth factor reveals the inducement to invest as this rate acts as a proxy for technical change in the Kaleckian investment-ordering model. The two factors combine to explain the accumulation process, both level and variability, and its link to technical change. In conclusion, this paper demonstrates that investment, incorporating technical change, enables industries to become sustainable into the uncertain future with varying states of investment instability.

…technical progress cannot be regarded as automatic and independent of accumulation. (Salter, 1966, p. 72)     

A View from the South on: ‘The Australian Economy: A View from the North’*

This paper reviews the Brookings Study of the Australian economy reported in Richard E. Caves and Lawrence B. Krause (editors), The Australian Economy: A View from the North, Sydney, George Allen & Unwin, 1984. After some general observations the paper considers each of the chapters in more detail.     

The Impact of Regulatory Reform on the Portfolio Performance of Australian Credit Unions

This paper applies a portfolio approach to examine the effectiveness of the Financial Institutions (FI) Code (1992) in achieving the twin regulatory objectives of stability and efficiency in Australian credit unions. A model is developed to examine the allocation of credit union portfolios in unregulated and regulation-constrained environments. The impact of regulatory constraints on portfolio performance prior to and following the introduction of the FI Code is thus assessed. The paper concludes that, overall, the FI Code increased both the stability and the allocative efficiency of credit unions over that of previous regulatory regimes.     

The Efficiency Impact of the Chinese Industrial Reforms in the 1980’s

A stochastic frontier production function is used to estimate the effect of partial and gradual reforms in the 1980’s in each of seven state-owned manufacturing industries. Reform-induced gains in technical efficiency were significant in all sample industries although not always substantial enough to motivate industry-wide productivity growth. The bonus system had speedy and impressive efficiency effects, but there is no consistent evidence on the effectiveness of other reform measures, including greater output autonomy, partial exposure to market influences, and the possibility of dismissals for malfeasance. Equalization of marginal factor returns across firms was observed in some industries, which may be considered as evidence of improved allocative efficiency in response to the reforms.     

The Impact of Immigration on a Depressed Labour Market: The South Australian Experience*

This paper examines the impact of immigration on the relatively depressed labour market in South Australia during the 1976-81 inter-censal period. The findings indicate that recently arrived immigrants have experienced exceedingly high unemployment rates. However, this is consistent with the view that immigration generates additional job opportunities for Australian residents (except in the manufacturing industry and trades occupations), and that immigrants experience high unemployment rates specifically because they have been unable to compete a 'fair share' of jobs away from residents already entrenched in the labour market.     

财富能力:现代财富生产的核心

历史上人们的财富观念以及获取财富的方法随经济活动方式的改变而改变。在经济全球化和虚拟经济迅猛发展的今天,财富生态发生了重大变化,同时使得我国的财富生产面临新的危机。增强国家和企业的财富能力,包括财富生产的能力、控制财富"食物链"的能力以及确保财富安全的能力等已成为当务之急。     

The Impact of the Welfare State on the Economic Status of Indigenous Australian Women

This article uses census data and Department of Social Security administrative records to examine the role of social security income in explaining the growth and relative improvement in the income status of indigenous Australian women. The real median income of indigenous women was 81 per cent of that of non-indigenous women in 1991 compared with 74 per cent in 1976. Much of the change has come about from an improvement in the position of indigenous women who were not in employment. The article argues that much of this improvement can be attributed to increased access to social security benefits for indigenous women and therefore needs to be qualified by the circumstances in which these women live.     

The Distribution of Wealth in Australia — A Survey*

This paper surveys and analyzes the available evidence on the distribution of wealth in Australia. On the basis of this evidence, it is argued that the cross-section distribution of personal wealth reveals considerable concentration in the top tail, with the top 1 per cent of adult individuals holding around 25 per cent of private wealth. The inequality of wealth revealed in the cross-section distribution among the top 10 per cent of wealth holders is not significantly reduced when adjustments are made to correct for life-cycle influences. Although the proportion of wealth held by the top 1 per cent of adult individuals has decreased sharply since World War I, the second to tenth percentiles have almost the same proportion in the 1960s and 1970s as in 1915.     

论财富的时间原理

从分析时间观、财富观的变迁出发,论证了经济学、时间、财富之间的历史逻辑,认为现代经济学采用的是绝对时间观,财富主要建立在物理时间度量之上,经济学虽以心理分析为基础,但未引入心理时间的研究.针对现代经济学的缺陷,从广义虚拟经济视角对财富与时间的本质进行了重新解读,诠释了时间价值的经济学意义,根据虚拟价值非边际化和信息态的特点,提出财富的时间价值可分解为物理时间价值和心理时间价值.虚拟价值主要用心理时间度量.虚拟价值拟物化和时间寻租是发展虚拟经济的重要法则.     

Distributional Impact of Government Outlays on the Australian Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme in 2001–02

In recent years outlays on the Australian Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme have increased rapidly, prompting both attempts by government to reduce growth in outlays and renewed interest in the characteristics of the beneficiaries of the Scheme. This article uses a microsimulation model to analyse the distributional impact of Australian Government outlays on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, by such characteristics as family income, family type, age, sex and lifecycle group. We find that there are pronounced distributional effects by such characteristics as income, age and sex, with both older and poorer Australians receiving far greater PBS benefits than younger and more affluent Australians.     

The Impact of Productivity Growth on the Costs of Production in Australian Manufacturing Industries*

The primary objective of this study is to examine the impact of technological progress on costs of production in 34 Australian manufacturing industries. An analytical model incorporating the notion of factor-augmenting technological change was developed and applied to each industry. The results indicated that in most of the industries technological progress during the period 1954–55 to 1981–82 had been biased towards augmenting labour and thereby reducing the cost of labour per unit of production. The implication of the analysis is that there is a nexus between incomes policy and the rate and bias of factor-augmenting technological change.