Ahead of the upcoming Australian Government's Economic Reform Roundtable, this policy report highlights relevant research and potential policy directions aimed at achieving the Roundtable’s stated goals of improving resilience, productivity and fiscal sustainability. It provide policymakers with recommendations in four key areas.

This interim report supports the National Competition Policy process by analysing the economic effects of two policy reforms: occupational licensing reform to promote labour mobility and adopting international and overseas standards. These two reforms would promote competition and increase Australia’s gross domestic product.

This report highlights the topical issue of employers’ experiences with retention issues providing insights across industries and occupation groups. It provides an overview, staff replacement rates, reasons for replacing staff, impacts on businesses and strategies used to retain staff. It finds that high staff turnover is hurting productivity and pushing up recruitment and training costs.

Use of restraint of trade contract clauses is of growing interest in Australia. This includes non-compete clauses (NCCs). Of particular interest are the effects of NCCs on productivity and wages, and options for reform. This paper sets out the context, the arguments against NCCs, how other countries have regulated NCCs and the Australian Government's approach.

The New South Wales JobSaver program was a job retention scheme that supported businesses and workers during the 2021 COVID-19 lockdowns by subsidising a proportion of firms’ payroll expenses. But like the federal JobKeeper program, it may have preserved jobs during the lockdown at the cost of poorer future labour market outcomes for the workers...