This book, extensively revised and updated in its second edition, presents a comprehensive overview of housing policy in Australia over the last quarter century. At a time of widespread concern about declining housing system performance, it investigates the many dimensions of housing affordability and housing wealth inequality, together with government actions affecting these outcomes.The authors analyse the causes and implications of falling home ownership, rising rental stress ra...

This book explores the decline and growth of the private rental sector in Australia delving into the changing dynamics of landlord investment and tenant profile over the course of the twentieth century and into the present period. It explains why over one in four Australian households are now private renters and investigates the contemporary legal and regulatory frameworks governing the sector. The reform discourses in Australia and comparator countries, and debates around key concerns suc...

This book, the first comprehensive overview of housing policy in Australia in 25 years, investigates the many dimensions of housing affordability and government actions that affect affordability outcomes. It analyses the causes and implications of declining home ownership, rising rates of rental stress and the neglect of social housing, as well as the housing situation of Indigenous Australians. The book covers a period where housing policy primarily operated under a neo-liberal paradigm d...

Why are house prices in many advanced economies rising faster than incomes? Why isn't land and location taught or seen as important in modern economics? What is the relationship between the financial system and land?In this accessible but provocative guide to the economics of land and housing, the authors reveal how many of the key challenges facing modern economies - including housing crises, financial instability and growing inequalities - are intimately tied to the land economy....

Countries with smaller governments grow faster.Tobacco taxes are the best way to cut smoking.Government regulation discourages entrepreneurshi****p.Award-winning investigative journalist Tom Bergin digs into eight mantras widely accepted by Western governments and, by talking to the people who promote those ideas and the workers, businesspeople and consumers who have felt their impacts, finds they often don't play out...

This book looks at how Ireland as a small open economy can prosper in the medium term. It contains recommendations from Irelands top economic and policy commentators for boosting and sustaining the post-crisis economy. The book is policy relevant accessible and written to stimulate public debate.

We are heading towards Thomas Piketty’s predicted steady state of wealth being worth six times national income. We are not immune to his prognosis of a return to Victorian-style levels of inequality.The most recent NBR Rich List has revealed the biggest proportional increase in wealth since the list first appeared in 1986. But what do these figures mean and what else do we know about New Zealand’s fortunes? Following his groundbreaking work on income inequality, Max Rashbrooke examines how...

This book illustrates essential microeconomic concepts and theories through the examination of related policy formulation in Australia since the 1980s. It provides a fresh approach to the subject of microeconomics from the perspective of both market and government failures.By looking at how Australia has transformed over the course of time, the book traces and tracks these changes and relates them to the broader microeconomic reforms. It also looks at the structure of Australian ec...

Amidst the debates about ‘austerity’ a number of vital debates in public finance have been sidelined. Because the reductions in government spending – small though they have been so far- have been designed to reduce the government’s borrowing requirement, there has been little discussion of whether the size of the state should be reduced in order to facilitate long-run reductions in the burden of taxation. This book traces the history of the growth of the size of the state over the last 100...

Over the last two decades new and significant demographic, economic, social and environmental changes and challenges have shaped the production and consumption of housing in Australia and the policy settings that attempt to guide these processes. These changes and challenges, as outlined in this book, are many and varied. While these issues are new they raise timeless questions around affordability, access, density, quantity, type and location of housing needed in Australian towns and citi...

Markets are taken as the norm in economics and in much of political and media discourse. But if markets are superior why does the public sector remain so large? Avner Offer provides a distinctive new account of the effective temporal limits on private, public, and social activity. Understanding the Private–Public Divide accounts for the division of labour between business and the public sector, how it changes over time, where the boundaries ought to run, and the harm that follows if they a...

Given the huge impact of the 2008 financial crash and post-crash austerity on so many people’s lives, there is a need for a concise, accessible guide to its causes and its longer-term significance. Written by an expert in political science and straddling finance, economics and political science, this entry-level summary demystifies global finance and puts the financial crisis in its historical context. It also outlines the policy responses of Western governments to the crash and the ensuin...