John Quiggin

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. If you would like to receive my (hopefully) regular email news, please sign up using the following link http://eepurl.com/dAv6sX You can also follow me on Twitter @JohnQuiggin, at my Facebook public page   and at my Economics in Two Lessons page Like this:Like Loading...

The latest issue of Coalwire, a weekly newsletter covering the transition away from coal list three separate corruption cases involving coal: in Indonesia, South Africa and Bangladesh. These aren’t isolated instances: in just about every jurisdiction that isn’t moving away from coal at a rapid rate, the industry is associated with cronyism at best, and outright corruption at worst. In Australia, for example, the push to develop the Galilee Basin is being driven by a set of...

Lots of people, notably including political commentators, imagine Queensland as a state dominated by mining and agriculture, and presumed to think and vote accordingly. I’ve just collected some statistics in response to a query made to the university, and I thought they might be of more general interest. Like Australia as a whole, the Queensland economy is dominated by services. As this table shows, agriculture and mining each account for about 2.5 per cent of total employment....

I’ll be giving a public lecture on The Future of Work at ANU on 6 March. It’s the Keith Hancock* lecture, sponsored by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, in honour of one our great labour economists. Details are here . An outline The outcomes of technological change are affected by the interaction of changes in the regulation of labour markets and the stance of public policy. For the last 40 years, changes in labour market regulation have been almost uniformly...

In addition to my regular mailing list, I’m offering one specifically devoted to the campaign against Adani’s Carmichael mine project, and, more generally, in support of a transition to an economy based on renewable energy. You can subscribe at http://eepurl.com/ghBN0n Like this:Like Loading...

The Morrison government has just announced what it calls a climate policy, promising expenditure of $2 billion. I’ll have more to say about this later, but I want first to point out that the promised expenditure is to be allocated over ten years, at an average rate of $200 million a year. That’s only marginally more than the government spent on advertising in 2017-18, which is appropriate, I suppose, for what is basically a PR exercise. The big problem here is the new practice of...

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. If you would like to receive my (hopefully) regular email news, please sign up using the following link http://eepurl.com/dAv6sX You can also follow me on Twitter @JohnQuiggin, at my Facebook public page   and at my Economics in Two Lessons page Like this:Like Loading...

Federal Government last night released an independent interim assessment of the recent fish deaths. The report is damning, but you wouldn’t know that reading the press release from the relevant minister, David Littleproud. Here’s my response, which I provided to the Australian Science Media Centre The Report clearly describes the “antecedent conditions” which made the Lower Darling so vulnerable to large-scale fish deaths, all of which reflect policy failures of the current...

Adani has been pretty quiet after the publication of a leaked memo from its newly hired law firm AJ & Co, named for its founder and managing partner, Andrew Johnson. AJ promised to act as an “attack dog” to silence opponents and sue them into bankruptcy, something Adani is already attempting in the case of indigenous leader Adrian Burragubba (I understand that funds have been raised to ensure that this doesn’t happen). This is what is known= as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public...

Over the fold, the statement agreed to by a large group of participants at the renewable energy workshop I attended at ANU last week. Coverage in The Guardian and RenewEconomy . Electricity transmission, storage and market reform required now to achieve emissions targets 50 energy experts gathered for a three day symposium at the Australian National University last week to discuss the latest research on the role of renewable energy in Australia’s low-carbon transition....