Identification and Measurement of Australian Consumer Sentiment

This article was prepared by Dr L. V. Defris and J. S. McDonnell of the Institute research staff. The authors wish to thank Professor R. F. Henderson and Dr P. J. Sheehan for their helpful comments.     

Deficit financing,liquidity, and the government budget constraint

This article presents a macroeconomic model in which government deficits are bond financed and the stock of bonds may affect both expected income and liquidity. If either of these effects exists, then comparative statics analysis requires the government budget to be balanced. Temporary divergences from a balanced budget and changes in the maturity structure of the government debt may be analyzed in terms of changes in the stock of bonds. It is shown that traditional fiscal and monetary policies may have a perverse effect; that to ensure effective policy, deficit financing and open market operations should be avoided; and that only policies involving a balanced budget or the financing of deficits or surpluses through changes in the stock of money should be undertaken.     

On the concept of optimum population

The economic welfare of a community is affected by policies that determine both the rate of capital accumulation and the rate of growth of population. The optimum size of population at any point is time will depend on the size of the existing capital stock and the optimum rate of savings will depend on the existing number of people. Consequently, in this sense, a population policy cannot be developed without a concurrent savings policy. The criterion of optimality that will be used is the ma ximization of the total discounted welfare of all generations from now to infinity. The problem will be to select that rate of savings and that size of population at every moment which will achieve this maximum welfare if, in fact, a maximum exists. An inquiry is made into the existence of an optimum policy under various circumstances. An attempt is made to evaluate the consequences of various ethical beliefs.     

An application of the extended cross impact method to generating scenarios of social change in Japan

Scenarios of Japanese society in 2000 are obtained by applying an extended correlational cross impact analysis. Since the scope of the scenarios is extensive, a procedure is developed to generate the scenarios that consists of a preprocessing of the events of interest and a step-by-step application of a cross impact method. Three scenarios are described, based on a workshop where the procedure was applied.     

Fit performance of several programs used for non-linear least squares problems

Seven computerprograms for non-linear regression or curve fitting problems are compared. The comparison of the programs, running in different computing centra, is restricted to the fit performance. Six model functions are fitted according to the least squares criterion to data series, arising from practical work. The special least squares minimization programs turned out to be better suited for these problems than general optimizing programs.