In 1999 Tony Blair, the UK Prime Minister, promised to end child poverty within a generation. What does this mean? Can it be achieved? What progress has been made so far? The paper starts by placing UK child poverty at the end of the 20th Century in historical and international context. It reviews the policies that have been introduced in order to meet specific interim targets - of reducing child poverty by one quarter by 2004/5 and halving it in ten years - and discusses the prospects for success in meeting these targets. The second part takes a step back and reflects on why child poverty - rather than poverty more generally - has become the political and policy focus. It then considers whether such an emphasis - together with the particular policy directions that have been taken - may be counter-productive in meeting the eventual goal of ending child poverty. The ‘end to child poverty’ has now been translated as meaning having achieved a relative child poverty rate that is ‘among the best (i.e. lowest) in Europe’. The final part of the paper considers what this might involve. To what extent can the policy approaches taken by the current ‘best in Europe’ countries be seen as recipes for success for the UK, or indeed elsewhere?

The paper provides an assessment of the recommendations of the Financial System Inquiry and the Government’s reform proposals relating to the regulatory structure, financial safety and the mega-prudential regulator, systemic stability, and competition policy in the financial sector. It is argued that key reform proposals are based on explicit or implicit assumptions relating to the workings of financial markets and institutions. The Report fails to test those assumptions against contemporary and prospective circumstances to determine the practical worth of the recommendations.

A lecture delivered at a Public Meeting of the Centre for Applied Economic and Policy Research, held at Swinburne University of Technology on 10 July 2006. The author is Emeritus Professor in the History of Economic Theory, Cambridge, Emeritus Fellow, Jesus College, Cambridge and Professor Emeritus, Adelaide.

This paper reviews the empirical evidence of rigidity in the New Zealand labour market over the period 1984–1990, with particular reference to collective bargaining. It demonstrates that labour market institutions displayed an important degree of flexibility over this period. Despite this, labour markets were stigmatized as ‘inflexible’ in public debate and labour market policy has been driven by the assumption that more flexibility was required.

The Committee on Employment Opportunities viewed temporary wage subsidies as a means through which the current long-term unemployed could be brought back into the effective labour supply. Experience with wage subsidies suggests that they will lead to minimal job creation and a churning of the pool of unemployment.

‘Governance’ in its simplest form is the way that an organisation is directed and controlled, but the concept of governance also incorporates systems of rules, relationships, and processes to achieve that end. This article focuses on governance of sporting organisations in Australia. Sport in Australia is organised in a singular fashion when compared to other organisations and to sport in other countries. This has significant implications for assumptions about corporate structure, law and governance. The article examines governance of sporting organisations from a number of perspectives and draws distinctions between standard assumptions about governance and the realities of sports governance in Australia. It concludes that a number of assumptions made about organisations in law and governance theory do not apply to Australian sporting organisations. It asks how these anomalies in assumption and execution affect ultimate good governance in sport and impact on the way directors approach their duties.

Using work from home (WFH) scores obtained by matching Philippine occupations with U.S. O*NET occupations, this paper estimates that only 12.38% of all workers can WFH and 25.7% of Philippine occupations are teleworkable––mostly from the following occupational groups: professionals, clerical support workers, and technicians and associate professionals. The education, real estate and, professional, scientific and technical sectors account for the largest share of teleworkable jobs. Those workers belonging to lower per capita income deciles, who are male, who have lower levels of education, who are self-employed, aged 55 and older, and who are working in sectors such as agriculture and retail, are also less likely to be in teleworkable occupations.

The process of financialisation has been cast as a major contributor to increasing inequality of wealth and income in a number of advanced industrialised economies, but the nature of the link requires precise clarification. In this article, we argue that financialisation in Australia has advanced inequality, but in a particular way. Charting several features of ‘financialisation of the macroeconomy’, we accept that this process has contributed to increased inequality in the sense that the wealthy have increased their wealth faster than households and individuals at the lower end of the wealth distribution. However, there is limited Australian evidence to suggest that income redistribution has occurred as a result of the ‘financialisation of the firm’. At the level of the firm, increased inequality of wealth can be attributed directly to financialisation if firm practices are oriented to increasing shareholder value at the expense of returns to other stakeholders such as workers or suppliers, and increased income inequality can be linked specifically to financialisation through increases in earnings to financial agents. We suggest several reasons for the relative absence of a firm-level dimension of financialisation but caution that such a trend remains possible, particularly if regulation of the labour market is weakened.

The rise of wages in China would seem to indicate that the demographic dividend has reached its end. A more refined approach reveals, however, that the situation of Chinese workers has not really improved: even though real wages are rising, the share of wages in the nation’s wealth has not kept pace. The reason for this is China’s position within global value chains, where the employment relationship is not solely governed by the employer–employee power relationship, but by contractual relations established between ‘lead firms’ and subcontractors. This situation echoes labour institutional economist JR Commons’ concept of ‘competitive menace’ and analyses of the structural imbalance of power in the employer/employee relationship. We argue that despite the Chinese government’s desire for industrial upgrading and its intention to develop internal labour markets, Chinese labour institutions have shown significant resistance to change making it hard to envisage any shift towards a Fordist regime of capital accumulation based on a virtuous cycle of mass production and mass consumption.

This paper examines some of the main arguments relating to the effect of privatisation on efficiency. It is concerned with both narrow economic issues and wider political issues. After a critical examination of some theories, which assert that private ownership is intrinsically more efficient than public ownership, it is argued that for large scale enterprise there are no strong economic reasons for believing in the superiority of private enterprise. As long as the government in question has the will and the power to make a public enterprise function in a socially efficient fashion, the public enterprise may be just as efficient as private enterprise whilst offering additional economic and social advantages.

With the ascendancy of neoliberalism, the Australian state has not only remained strongly interventionist but has also expanded its sphere of influence and scope of activity. This is contrary to claims of a reduced, withered or slimmed neoliberal state. The Australian state's interventions have become increasingly varied in the overwhelming pursuit of structural competitiveness. It has developed an extensive ‘micro-structuring’ role, particularly through the creation of new regulatory instruments and institutions, but has not relinquished its economic ‘macro-structuring’ role notwithstanding changes to macroeconomic policy priorities. The Australian state's interventions have shaped all institutional forms comprising the mode of régulation that guides and supports the accumulation regime. This article discusses the reconfiguration of the Australian state and the forms of its ongoing interventions which have secured and sustained the contemporary growth regime.

This research analyses the effect of a ‘two-tier’ system of collective bargaining (firm bargaining and multi-employer bargaining levels) on wage dispersion in Spain. The effect of collective bargaining on the two main concepts that make up wages (the contractual or basic-bargained wage, and the wage cushion) are analysed during the last period of the upward cycle (2002–2006) and the beginning of the global financial crisis (2006–2010). The wage cushion is defined as the difference between the earned wage and the basic-bargained wage. The results show that workers covered by firm bargaining experienced greater wage dispersion than workers covered by multi-employer bargaining. On the other hand, wage dispersion for all workers decreased during the analysis period, mainly during the first stage of the current economic crisis, and particularly among workers covered by multi-employer bargaining. Both the decreasing relevance of the wage cushion in actual wage formation and its reduced dispersion make it possible to explain this wage compression.

The great recession of 2008/2009 had a huge impact on unemployment and public finances in most advanced countries, and these impacts were magnified in the southern Euro area by the sovereign debt crisis of 2010/2011. The fiscal consolidation imposed by the European Union on highly indebted countries was based on the assumptions of so-called expansionary austerity. However, the reality so far provides proof to the contrary, and the results outlined in this article support the opposing view of a self-defeating austerity. Based on a model of the input–output relations of the productive system, an unemployment rate/budget balance trade-off equation is derived, as well as the impact of a strong fiscal consolidation based on social transfers and the notion of a neutral budget balance. An application to the Portuguese case confirms the huge costs of a strong fiscal consolidation, both in terms of unemployment and social policy regress. The conclusion is that too much consolidation in anyone year makes consolidation more difficult in the following year.

There has been little empirical research into enterprise and workplace industrial relations. The Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey fills a major void. This paper examines the results of this Survey. It challenges the ‘industrial relations’ perspective adopted as well as some of the major conclusions, particularly those relating to industrial relations constraints upon flexibility. The paper also compares the findings with those of the Business Council’s Industrial Relations Study Commission.

The IT industry has been portrayed as instrumental to India’s transition to a high-growth economy. But critics argue that it has delivered few benefits to the wider population. In this context, industry advocates have drawn attention to the direct and indirect impact of IT on output and employment. This article critically explores these claims by locating them in the conventional (neoliberal) narrative of India’s recent economic development. It finds that industry claims are exaggerated and that IT industry demand is often linked to the creation of employment in industries dominated by informal employment arrangements. The prevalence of informal employment highlights problems of low pay and poor or hazardous working conditions. The IT industry’s rise to prominence has traversed a deeply ingrained process of labour market informalisation. In exaggerating the employment-generating capacity of the IT industry, its supporters have largely ignored problems relating to the quality of employment.

This article aims to set out some progressive, mainly post-Keynesian, macroeconomic policy ideas for debate and further research in the context of macroeconomic challenges faced by South Africa today. Despite some successes, including at reducing poverty, the South African economy has been characterised by low growth, rising unemployment and increasing inequality, which together with rampant corruption and governance failures combine to threaten the very core of the country’s stability and democracy. The neo-liberal economic policies that the African National Congress–led government surprisingly adopted in 1996 in order to assuage global markets sceptical of its historical support for dirigiste economic policy, have simply not worked. Appropriate progressive macroeconomic interventions are urgently needed to head off the looming prospect of a failed state in the country which Nelson Mandela led to democracy after his release from prison in February 1990. What happens in Africa’s southern tip should still matter for progressives all around the world. The article draws on both history and theory to demonstrate the roots of such progressive heterodox economic thinking and support for a more carefully coordinated activist state-led macroeconomic policy, both in general terms and in the South African context. It shows that such approaches to growth and development – far from being populist – also have a rich history and respectable theoretical pedigree behind them and are worthy of inclusion in the South African policy debate.

Recent research has identified a substantial increase in Indigenous mainstream employment since the mid-1990s, but there has been relatively little regional analysis of such employment. The aim of this article is to build on this previous research using the 2006 and 2011 censuses to provide a more disaggregated descriptive analysis of changes in the character of labour market outcomes for Indigenous Australians aged 15–64 years. One of the new findings in the article is that the employment of Indigenous youth (i.e. those aged 15–24 years) in remote areas is different from that of Indigenous youth in non-remote areas, but older Indigenous residents of such areas are not very different in employment terms. Policy-makers thus need to pay particular attention to Indigenous youth employment in remote areas because the failure to address these differentials may lead to a foreclosure of future labour market options. Policy also needs to facilitate Indigenous engagement in the mainstream economy by assisting Indigenous people to be work-ready, especially in ensuring that Indigenous skills are matched with employer demands, and expediting employment by informing businesses on how to provide an Indigenous-friendly workplace.

Unemployment is a health hazard. There is increasing Australian and international evidence that people who are unemployed are more likely to have higher rates of mortality, morbidity (illness) and use of health services. The large numbers of people who are unemployed mean that the impacts of unemployment are just not felt at individual or family level but across the population as a whole. This paper outlines the evidence of the impact of unemployment on health and discusses some of the ways in which these health problems could be addressed through reorientation of health services, developing the skills of people who are unemployed, strengthening community action, creating environments that support people who are unemployed and their families, and the development of public policy. It discusses some of the difficulties in undertaking research in this area and calls for a more systematic approach to understanding the cost of unemployment.

Economists tend to have a bias towards faith in market forces. For many economists this is re-enforced by a libertarian social philosophy. Professional judgements made by such economists often reflect their social philosophy as much as the conclusions of purely economic analysis.

The increase in precarious forms of work has been extensively investigated by scholars. However, the implications of precarity for workers’ education have not been adequately explored. There is a great need for an approach to workers’ education that will advance the social and economic interests of precarious workers and other marginalised communities who are becoming a major segment of the workforce. Based on in-depth interviews, this article identifies education regarding wages, women and work, working conditions, labour laws and practical skills like public speaking, reading and writing as core elements of a curriculum for the education of precarious workers. Given that precarious workers tend not to be organised in formal structures, non-governmental organisations and trade unions will have to reach out to them to make sure that they provide alternative structures able to craft educational programmes that can build the confidence of precarious workers so that they can challenge their precariousness.