John Quiggin

I got a message from a student asking about examples of renationalisation in Australia. Here’s my response There hasn’t been much explicit renationalisation of business enterprises in Australia. What we have seen is (a) Public private partnerships (PPPs) being wound up and returned to the public sector. As well as Port Macquarie, some others are mentioned herehttps://grattan.edu.au/news/public-private-hospital-partnerships-are-risky-business/and here on private...

I was asked by a journalist about the long-term fiscal effects of the government response to the crisis. Here’s what I said  In simple accounting terms the cost of the intervention so far can mostly be offset simply by cancelling the Stage 3 tax cuts legislated in advance for 2024-25 (this also happened when the Keating Labor government legislated for future tax cuts in the 1990s). These are projected to cost $95 billion over the five years to 2029-30so the saving would easily...

Another recent piece, this time in Inside Story. Opening paras Supporters of ethnonationalist and anti-immigrant sentiment have been quick to seize on the Covid-19 pandemic as evidence against what they call “open borders,” by which they mean any relaxation of the stringent controls that prohibit international migration by anyone who falls outside a tightly defined set of categories, each subject to numerical limits. The underlying idea is that foreigners who don’t look or think...

I forgot to link to this piece in The Conversation when it came out a week ago. Unlike much of what I’ve written lately, it hasn’t been overtaken by events. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

The New Daily asked me to write a bit on the question “What should/will the post-coronavirus economy look like? Here’s what I sent The Covid crisis has demonstrated the inadequacy of crucial aspects of our social and economic system, particularly relating to employment and unemployment.  Before the resurgence of neoliberalism in the 1970s, Australian governments accepted responsibility for maintaining full employment, and provided support for all those unable to engage in paid...

Back again with 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...

It seems quite likely that we will soon see the introduction of a wage subsidy along the lines of that announced by Boris Johnson (himself now testing positive!) in the UK. That is, a payment to employers equal to 70 or 80 per cent of workers’ pre-crisis wages, in return for keeping them on for some period. That would be better than doing nothing beyond what has already been announced, but I have two big problems with it. First, it is paid to companies rather than workers. The ACTU...

The ABC has an article quoting University of Melbourne epidemiologist Tony Blakely as saying (approvingly) that the object of the current “flattening the curve strategy is to smooth the path to herd immunity. Key quotes You don’t go in too hard because you actually want the infection rate to pick up a bit and then hold,” he said. “What they’re not saying is [that] ‘flatten the curve’ likely means [that] by the time this is over, 60 per cent of us will have been infected, to...

We won’t be travelling anywhere much  by air for some time to come, so this is a good time to reconsider our whole approach. I thought I’d start by digging out this post from 2007. A lot of discussion of climate change is based on the implicit or explicit premise that, since we use energy in everything we do, and most energy is derived from carbon-based fuels, large reductions in CO2 emissions will require radical changes in the way we live. Some people welcome this prospect, but most...

A new sandpit for long side discussions, conspiracy theories, idees fixes and so on. Like this:Like Loading...