A couple of years ago, the government changed the rules so that families on $150 000 a year or more wouldn’t be eligible to receive family payments. There were the predictable cries of ‘class warfare’, but there were also claims that $150 000 in Australia leaves you struggling to make ends meet. The Daily Telegraph found a couple on $150k who said “you can survive on $150,000 but you definitely aren’t doing well,” while in The Australian, a couple on $200 000 said “the government are making it bloody hard.”
A discussion of Australian political and economic issues and ideas, by Matt Cowgill.
Archives for posts with tag: statistics
Has the Fair Work Act made the labour market less efficient at matching unemployed people to jobs? One way economists would try to answer that question is with the Beveridge curve.
Should we consider the croupiers at Crown Casino to be public sector employees? How about people who file away books at the National Library of Australia? The answers to those questions seem to be yes and no, respectively, according to the Institute of Public Affairs.
Tasmania has set an unfortunate record: it’s the first Australian state in which less than half of all adult men are employed full time. In the lead-up to the financial crisis, the proportion of Tasmanian men in work soared, rising faster than the national ratio, but it has since plummeted. In February 2013, just 48.3% of Tasmanian men aged 15 and over were in full-time work; this was 8.3 percentage points below the national figure of 56.6%.
Imagine that it’s grand final day, only rather than being the massive television spectacle we’re accustomed to, no cameras or journalists are allowed inside the MCG. No spectators are allowed to communicate the score with anyone outside the ground.
In late 2010, we set an all-time record for the Australian economy: nearly 66% of people aged 15 and over were either employed, or were actively looking for work. To put that in perspective, the labour force participation rate has averaged 63.2% since 1980.
At 11:30 this morning, the ABS published the Australian national accounts for the March quarter of this year. Among other things, they show that the rate of productivity growth has surged – in the past year, labour productivity in the market sector grew at its fastest pace in over a decade. I’m sure this will be a major focus of the news coverage tomorrow, just as the disappointing productivity numbers were closely examined in early 2011. Just in case The Australian doesn’t choose to highlight the issue, here’s a handy chart for your reference:
Labour productivity in the market sector – year ended growth
Source: Calculations based on ABS 5206, table 1.
While it’s true that you should be careful about drawing too many conclusions from the quarterly productivity data, that was just as true this time last year when various pundits leapt on the data to suggest that the Fair Work Act has damaged Australia’s productivity performance.
It’s hard to sum up the state of the labour market in one statistic, but that doesn’t stop us trying. The most commonly used figure is of course the unemployment rate, but that can hide some interesting developments in the world of work, like if people have their hours cut or if others leave the labour force entirely. I generally prefer the employment-to-population ratio, which tells us the proportion of working age people (usually just everyone aged 15 and over) who are in work. Still, the employment-to-population ratio doesn’t tell us about changes between part-time and full-time work.
For that reason, I’ve been looking at this measure that I’ve spliced together from the Labour Force statistics: the number of hours worked in a given month, per working age person (everyone 15+). This is a bit like the employment-to-population ratio, but it uses hours rather than employed persons as the numerator.
The hours worked-to-population ratio
This chart tells us that there isn’t as much work to go around as there was before the GFC, but we’re doing better than we were in early 2009. The number of hours per person flattened out in 2011, dipped in January and has recovered some lost ground in March.
