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Comparing Australian Macroeconomic Management: Labor versus Coalition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2023

P.N. Junankar
P.N. Junankar*
Affiliation:
School of Economics and Finance, University of Western Sydney and Institute for the Study of Labour, IZA, Bonn
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Abstract

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This paper attempts to assess the relative performance of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the Coalition governments in their management of the Australian macroeconomy. Given the problem of defining an appropriate counter/actual, we make comparisons using a number of different methods. Firstly we compare the averages of the key macroeconomic variables for the period of each government and then compare changes over the tenure of each government. Secondly, we use the method of ‘difference in differences’; that is, we compare the performance of the Australian economy with the US economy. This allows us to control for any features of the world economy that may be driving all the economies. A crude comparison suggests that the Labor party performed better on inflation and the real rate of interest while the Coalition performed better on growth and unemployment. However, there is no clear cut answer.

Type
Symposium on Monetary and Fiscal Policy in Theory and Practice
Information
The Economic and Labour Relations Review , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , July 2005 , pp. 43 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2005

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Linda Tran and M. Arifur Rahman for providing me with excellent research assistance. Bruce Chapman kindly read the paper at short notice and provided some very helpful comments. I would also like to thank Fred Argy, Richard Denniss, Clive Hamilton, Cezary Kapuscinski and Michael Keating for some very perceptive comments on an earlier version of this paper. This paper was initially published as the Australia Institute Discussion Paper No. 79. I thank them for providing me with its copyright. I am responsible for all remaining errors.

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