People & associates
Sinclair Davidson
Does Australia have a Productivity Growth Problem?
Ever since Paul Krugman stated that productivity was ‘almost everything', policy makers have been obsessed with improving it. This focus has led to a great deal of policy confusion. Productivity is important, but it is not an active policy...
Submission to the Senate inquiry into Competition within the Australian Banking Sector
Kevin Rudd's darkest days
Kevin Rudd spent a fair amount of his intellectual capacity drubbing Friedrich von Hayek. Two major speeches given to the Centre for Independent Studies put the boot into Hayek who had also featured prominently in Ruddite essays deploring free...
Economists as social engineers
In this paper, I make the argument that modern "mainstream" economic thought is inclined towards government intervention and social engineering. To the extent that economic analysis is seen simply as a tool it is likely that economists will...
Climategate: What we've learned so far
The exposure of thousands of emails and documents from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia is one of the biggest developments in the climate change debate for the last ten years. The emails-now dubbed...
Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Stimulus Packages
Australia has experienced a generation of economic reform. The Australian economy is much more resilient to economic downturns now than it has been in the past. Of course our economy is somewhat vulnerable to international events and we do not...
Submission to Senate Inquiry into Trade Practices Amendment (Blacktown Amendment) Bill 2009
There are a number of problems associated with legislating against geographic price discrimination. In this paper Sinclair Davidson concentrates on two problems. The first is the practical problem of cost differentials across geographic space....
Australia's lonely stimulus
Much has been made of the fact that the government has acted to shield the economy from the impact of the crisis. The Rudd government's response to the global financial crisis was to ‘Go early, go hard, go household.' Since September 2008,...
Wayne Swan vs. The Wall Street Journal
Wayne Swan's second budget speech was magnificent in its rhetoric. The budget had been ‘forged in the fire' of economic crisis and Australians were ‘too strong, too resilient, and too united to be overwhelmed'. He told of how Australia...
Five and a half big things Kevin Rudd doesn't understand about the Australian economy
Five and a half big things Kevin Rudd doesn't understand about the Australian economy