An Estimated Australian Macroeconomic Misery Index

The degree of community satisfaction with alternative macroeconomic outcomes is of considerable interest to policy makers. Ad hoc measures of community macroeconomic welfare, so-called Misery Indexes, are commonly used as proxies of such welfare These indexes are very rudimentary and make implicit restrictive assumptions about the community's marginal rates of substitution among different macroeconomic outcomes. The current paper demonstrates a framework for statistically estimating the relative responsiveness of community welfare to such variables as unemployment, inflation, interest rates, real wages and measures of Australia's external performance. Morgan Gallup Poll data are used to proxy levels of community (dis)satisfaction .     

An Extension of the Trade Restrictiveness Index to Large Economies*

The Trade Restrictiveness Index (TRI) introduced by Anderson and Neary (1994 ) provided the first theoretically satisfying measure of a country’s tariff structure by overcoming the problem of ad hoc specification of indexing weights and the related index number problem. We observe, however, that the TRI may not exist or may not be unique when countries are large. As a remedy, we propose a simple extension.     

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     

Protection and the Future of Australian Manufacturing

This article was written by Richard H. Snape, Professor of Economics, Monash University. It is a revised version of a paper presented at the convention of the Institute of Industrial Economics (University of Newcastle) on 'The Future of Manufacturing Industry In Australia', Terrigal, 29 April to 1 May, 1977.     

The Pattern and Determinants of Intra-Industry Trade in Australian Manufacturing

This paper presents the pattern and determinants of intra-industry trade (IIT) in Australian manufacturing since the late 1970s. The results point to a sharp rise in IIT from the mid 1980s which appears to be linked with an outward-oriented policy. Industry-level analysis indicates that industries which experienced a sharp fall in protection are the industries with the higher levels of IIT. These include textiles, garments, rubber products, and machinery and equipment. An increasing trend in IIT suggests that the short-term adjustment costs associated with trade liberalisation are likely to be lower, and that liberalisation can proceed without huge short-term adjustment costs. Using a logit model the determinants of IIT are investigated. Results indicate that IIT is positively related to product differentiation and scale economies, and negatively related to the levels of protection and foreign ownership in the pre-liberalisation period. In the post-liberalisation period, however, scale economies explain the inter-industry variations in IIT. R&D intensity and close economic integration appear to have no impact on IIT regardless of the nature of the policy regime.     

国外贸易保护措施对中国制造业出口的影响——来自企业层面的微观证据

当前,以贸易保护主义为主要特征的"逆全球化"思潮涌现,国外的贸易保护措施对中国制造业的出口增长构成严重的威胁.那么,这些贸易保护措施对中国制造业的出口到底产生了怎样的影响?其内在机制是什么?文章采用2009?2011年GTA数据库与中国海关统计数据库的合并数据,从企业这一微观层面定量识别国外贸易保护措施对中国制造业出口的实际影响.研究发现:(1)国外贸易保护措施的实施显著地降低了受影响企业的出口规模,贸易保护措施的数量每增加1次,受影响企业的出口将下降17%左右;贸易保护强度每增加1个单位,受影响企业的出口将下降52%左右.(2)从影响机制看,国外贸易保护措施对制造业出口的抑制效应是通过降低出口的数量和质量来实现的.(3)贸易融资对制造业出口的边际影响最大,而贸易救济措施是对制造业出口整体影响最大的贸易保护措施.(4)国外贸易保护措施对外资企业、同质产品以及中间品出口的抑制作用更明显.文章的研究结论既为理解贸易保护主义的危害提供了经验证据,也为中国在持续推动对外开放背景下如何应对贸易保护壁垒提供了决策依据.     

Transport Cost and Tariff Protection of Australian Manufacturing*

This paper provides estimates of transport cost and tariff protection available to import-competing Australian manufacturing industries. It finds that transport costs provide an important component of total protection available to such industries; one which, for many, is more important than the Australian tariff. In view of the effects of protection on industrial structure and performance, it should be explicitly recognized that transport costs are an unavoidable element of the protective structure and are deserving of study in their own right.     

Trade Liberalization and Productivity Growth: Time-Series Evidence from Australian Manufacturing

This paper uses historical annual data for 27 years from 1968-69 on eight two-digit ANZSIC industries to assess the impact of the changes in industry assistance on economic efficiency. The empirical analysis shows that a 1 per cent decline in the nominal rate of assistance leads to between O.J 8 and 056 per cent gain in total factor productivity, the latter our measure of economic efficiency. This finding has strong policy implications for the future of tariff reform in the manufacturing sector.     

A Perspective on Modelling the Australian Real Trade Weighted Index since the Float

Since the deregulation of the Australian dollar market in December 1983, considerable effort has been devoted by the central bank to understanding movements in the value of the currency. As the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has a pivotal role to play in currency markets, attention has been focussed on the modelling techniques used by the Bank's researchers in this process. This paper examines the ancestral development of the current model of the Australian Trade Weighted Index ( rtwi ) used at the RBA, as specified in Beechey et al. (2000). Estimates and forecasting evaluations of the various models imply that only the relationships between the rtwi , the terms of trade and interest differentials hold consistently, providing the empirical foundation for the current RBA model.     

Partial‐ and General‐Equilibrium Measures of Trade Restrictiveness

New partial‐equilibrium forms of the Trade Restrictiveness Index and the Mercantilist Trade Restrictiveness Index have recently been used by the World Bank and others. In this paper we examine the bias in the partial‐equilibrium forms due to the neglect of general‐equilibrium effects. We propose “semi‐general‐equilibrium” measures that capture those general‐equilibrium effects due to vertical input–output relations without the need for a computable general‐equilibrium model. These measures also incorporate nontariff measures. Australian data are used to compute the semi‐general‐equilibrium measures. These estimates indicate that the partial‐equilibrium forms generally underestimate the true value of the indices, and by a large margin in some cases.     

企业业绩评价指标的创新研究

传统企业业绩评价指标难以适应现代企业管理的要求,需要进行变革创新。推广应用经济增加值指标是中国企业适应全球经济一体化和信息技术不断发展的必然趋势。     

Technological Change in Australian Manufacturing

In the modern era, the extent and character of technical change features prominently in discussions of productivity growth and movements in the competitiveness of manufacturing. While technical change is pervasive in modern manufacturing, it occurs unevenly. In this study, technical change is estimated by fitting dual cost functions for each of 38 sectors of Australian manufacturing over the 32 year period, 1968–69 to 1999–2000. The estimates show that technical change is heavily labour-saving in all industries, but that the overall rate of change, as measured by a rate of cost diminution, and the degree of bias towards saving labour, rather than capital or material, varies substantially across industries.     

Pricing in Australian Manufacturing*

The rate of change of prices of competing foreign products and the rate of change of costs of domestic production are both found to have positive impact on the rate of domestic price inflation in a cross section of Australian manufacturing industries over the period from 1968-69 to 1986-87. Prices of competing foreign products are found to have more impact, while production costs are found to have less impact, the higher is the level of domestic concentration, supporting the hypothesis that foreign and domestic competition have interactive effects on domestic prices.     

Manufacturing and the Trade Balance

When the world shifted to the regime of flexible exchange rates after 1970, economists expected that large trade imbalances would soon disappear. Instead, such imbalances not only persisted but soared in the 1980s and 1990s, in spite of significant changes in important currencies such as the yen, the mark and the dollar. This paper reports that manufacturing importers tend to suffer trade deficits whereas exporters of manufacturing products tend to enjoy trade surpluses. The reason lies in the higher rates of productivity growth experienced by exporters of manufactures.     

The Cost of Monopoly in Australian Manufacturing

This article looks at the deadweight loss arising from monopoly elements in Australian manufacturing under various assumptions and its relationship with the level of concentration.     

论后WTO的贸易保护

在入世过渡时期结束后,中国应该在WTO框架内实施贸易保护,从而达到贸易自由的目标.贸易自由理论和贸易保护理论并不是截然对立的,贸易自由理论中可以找到贸易保护的依据.贸易保护理论的终极目标是贸易自由.入世5年过渡时期的实践证明,中国既要积极应对其他国家的"合规性"贸易壁垒,也要在WTO框架内加紧构建自己的"合规性"贸易壁垒.