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Keywords: Economist

  • ECONOMICS

    Boost budget by chopping charities' tax take

    • David James
    • 27 August 2013
    3 Comments

    Australia is one of only a few countries in the world that has a franking credit system. Though it is designed to stop 'double taxation' on company tax, in many cases it ends up being a 'double reward' for entities that already have tax favoured status. Last year the Tax Commissioner generously refunded over $500 million to charities and not-for-profits on dividends because they pay no tax.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Inconvenient advice for a business-friendly prime minister

    • Michael Mullins
    • 08 July 2013
    4 Comments

    One of Kevin Rudd's key points of difference with Julia Gillard lies in his determination to project a business-friendly image for himself and the ALP. This may have something to do with his decision to dump former parliamentary secretary Andrew Leigh, who is Australia's leading inequality expert and clearly unsympathetic to the demands of big business on government.

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  • ECONOMICS

    How financial devils came to rule the universe

    • David James
    • 05 June 2013
    7 Comments

    Religious authorities may not spend a lot of time pondering the nature of global financial systems, but the Pope's recent comment that 'money has to serve, not rule' suggests it can be useful when they do. Given scope to become rule makers, rather than just people who know how to exploit the rules, financiers have moved themselves to a position of mastery.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Banksters' deadly game of Sheldon's three-person chess

    • David James
    • 01 May 2013
    3 Comments

    In The Big Bang Theory Sheldon invents a game of chess which 'utilises a three-sided board with transitional quadrilateral-to-triangular tessellation to solve the balanced centre combat-area problem'. This gobbledegook sounds suspiciously similar to the application of mathematical models to financial securities in derivatives markets.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Turkey's Kurdish Spring

    • William Gourlay
    • 12 April 2013
    3 Comments

    A public letter from the imprisoned leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), declared that PKK insurgents should forego armed struggle against the Turkish military. An end to terror is one thing, but there is a way to go before Turkey's Kurds have the rights and freedoms they've long hankered for. 

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Climate change and Australia's weather on steroids

    • Paul Collins
    • 04 February 2013
    38 Comments

    Foreign Minister Bob Carr has said that, coming from Australia where climate change denial 'fills the air', he finds it significant that world leaders see climate change as the world's most important concern, even more than the economy. Recent extreme weather events, including the floods in Queensland, are symptoms of long-term climate change.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Immigration for sale

    • Patrick McCabe
    • 24 October 2012
    3 Comments

    Proponent of an immigration 'free market' Gary Becker would accommodate poor migrants by allowing businesses to lend them the 'immigration fee' in exchange for their labour upon arrival. Poor migrants tend to be unskilled, so this scheme would remain largely unutilised. Moreover, this arrangement might amount to indentured servitude.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Ways out of economic depression

    • Bruce Duncan
    • 18 October 2012
    8 Comments

    Tony Abbott warned that Australia could go the way of Greece with excessive debt. Such claims reflect a climate of exaggerated concern about debt. Instead Australia could be taking advantage of historically low interest rates and embarking on major infrastructure projects, increasing employment and laying the basis for sustained growth in productivity.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The epiphanies of our lives

    • B.N. Oakman
    • 10 July 2012
    4 Comments

    I want  you to list the epiphanies in your lives, says the lecturer. We'll build poems around them...  I ponder, but cannot manage to think of one. Does he really believe people have several? My extra years are like binoculars peered through from the wrong end, shrinking past significance to present inconsequence.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Hockey and Thatcher's 'no entitlement' is bad economics

    • Michael Mullins
    • 14 May 2012
    15 Comments

    Joe Hockey provoked outrage with his recent suggestion that we should rely on families rather than the state for social welfare. His premise that high social spending leads to debt and decline reflects the GDP fetish of fundamentalist economists that Joseph Stiglitz blames for Europe's current economic problems.

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  • EDUCATION

    No easy cure for 'cost disease' in Australian schools

    • Dean Ashenden
    • 07 May 2012
    13 Comments

    The Productivity Commission Schools Workforce report released on Friday does contain evidence of the dire state of productivity in Australian schools, but it is largely neutered. It's as if the Commission was anxious to avoid stating too plainly a disease for which it can suggest only palliatives.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The best and worst of international aid

    • Duncan MacLaren
    • 17 April 2012
    4 Comments

    Rumour has it the Government's projected aid budget increases will be cut to ensure a surplus. Some aid doesn't work: I was horrified as a young aid worker in the '80s being told that an open sewer in an Addis Ababa slum was a World Bank project. But aid does work if it is underpinned by a few key principles.

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