Using microsimulation, Agnes Walker finds that if a policy was implemented which resulted in the lifting of the health status of all Australians to that of the most affluent 20 per cent in the population, then close to one million fewer Australians are estimated to be disabled, over 180,000 life years could be saved, health...

Prior to the last three decades, regular surveys on household income were rare or nonexistent in many developed countries, making it difficult for economists to compare income distribution in the long run. Using taxation statistics, which tend to be available over a longer time span, Andrew Leigh propose a method for imputing the incomes of...

Ann Harding, Rachel Lloyd, Anthea Bill and Anthony King outlines new techniques used to create synthetic household microdata and demonstrates how they can be used to analyse poverty rates, the spatial impact of possible policy change, and the characteristics of the poor by geographic area.

This ACOSS Senate Inquiry submission finds that the Government's higher education proposals fail to address the problem of student poverty and are likely to lead to fewer students from low income families attending university. The government's proposed scholarships are welcome but do not outweigh the negative aspects of the package. The submission quotes from recent...

In this paper William Mitchell, Martin Watts and John Burgess argue that governments that have followed the ideas embodied in the OECD approach to economic reform have successfully reduced inflation but worsened the economic outcomes for a vast number of disadvantaged workers.