Australian Economy

By Leith van Onselen The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has released visitor arrivals and departures data for the month of January, which revealed another fall in net long-term and permanent migration into Australia.

Oh dear.

Australia’ miracle economy is not as complex as it appears.

By Leith van Onselen New modelling by the Productivity Commission estimates that the closure of Australia’s car industry will cost up to 39,000 jobs, mostly in Victoria and South Australia.

By Leith van Onselen I wrote on Wednesday how both sides of politics plan to sell Victoria’s last major state-owned asset – the Port of Melbourne – in order to fund infrastructure to support Melbourne’s rapidly growing economy.

The AIG Performance of Construction Index is out and  has failed to complete a hat-trick with the PMI and PSI: The national construction industry contracted at a steeper rate in February as activity returned to negative territory for the first time in five months, after a sharper fall in new orders.

So the reserved and mild-mannered American Canadian law Professor James Allan, who works at an under performing Australian university, has recently written a long tirade against the bureaucratisation of higher education in Australia.

By Leith van Onselen The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has released trade data for the month of January, with Australia recording a seasonally-adjusted trade surplus of $1,433 million.

A decent theory for the blowout number in retail sales from the SMH blog: Retail spending may have jumped sharply in January, but economists warn it is too early to say if the good times are back for retailers.

By Leith van Onselen The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has just released retail sales figures for the month of January, which registered a 1.2% seasonally-adjusted increase in sales over the month, which met economist’s expectations.

By Leith van Onselen Of all the expenditure cuts by the Federal Government, cutting employment in the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has to be among the most reckless.

Education is Australia’s only real non-mining export industry of the future (as a subset of tourism), but that hasn’t helped it survive Budget rigors in the past few years and the cost is showing.

By Leith van Onselen Following on from yesterday’s national accounts release by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), I have once again benchmarked Australia’s economic recovery since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) against the recessions of the 1970s, 1980s and the 1990s.

The RBA’s John Edwards reckons: “There’s a debate about whether the place is picking up or tipping into a very serious downturn, and this certainly argues against the serious downturn point of view,” he said.

These people have no shame.

From Bloxo today comes another happy take: Today’s GDP numbers were positive. They showed that growth has picked up and that Australia’s great rebalancing act is underway. GDP rose by +0.8% in Q4 to be +2.8% higher y-o-y (market had +2.5%).