If Australian governments want to increase rates of economic growth they must reform the tax mix, and increase the workforce participation rates of women and older people, argues this report. Together these game-changing reforms could contribute more than $70 billion to the Australian economy. Governments should concentrate their limited resources for economic reform where they...

Australian governments are under constant pressure to intervene to support the economies of particular regions, particularly those that grow more slowly. The most prominent recent example is the Commonwealth Government’s “Commitment to Regional Australia” in September 2010 1 that promised $10b over eight years, partly implemented through the Investing in Australia’s Regions package in the...

For nearly a hundred years, governments have spent a lot of money trying to promote economic growth in regional Australia. This year's Federal Budget was no exception, with $4.3 billion worth of programs announced to help "unlock the economic potential of our regions". But governments are already spending more than $2 billion a year on...

Technology innovation is the key to reducing carbon emissions cheaply, according to this report based on the experience of six pollution pricing schemes in Australia and overseas. In each case, costs to reduce pollution, and actual prices, were much lower than governments and their experts expected. Governments consistently got it wrong when picking in advance...

Carbon pricing will mean real changes to parts of the Australian economy, write John Daley and Tristan Edis in Inside Story, but its impact on most industries will be small.