Economic News

Six years is a long time in economics. It is longer than many young workers have been in the labour force, and long enough for habits around pricing and pay to shift.

A rising unemployment rate is usually read as a warning light. When it creeps up in the same year a central bank lifts interest rates four times, it is easy to assume the two are linked in the bluntest possible way: higher rates, fewer …

Parliamentary hearings rarely produce surprises, but they do give the Governor of the Reserve Bank a chance to set out the big picture in her own words. When Michele Bullock delivered her opening statement to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics on …

Forecast tables are easy to skim past. But one number in the Reserve Bank's August Statement on Monetary Policy (SMP) has taken on fresh relevance. The RBA projected that the unemployment rate would reach 4.6 per cent by June 2027. At her media conference …

Union membership figures are not usually the stuff of monetary policy debates. But when inflation is running above target and businesses are passing on higher costs, the question of how wages respond becomes central. Could rising prices trigger bigger pay claims, which in turn …

When prices jump, pay packets rarely follow straight away. For many Australian workers, the timing of a wage rise depends less on the latest CPI print than on when their enterprise agreement comes up for renewal.

Seventy-nine. That is the number of wage-price spiral episodes identified across advanced economies in research cited by Iain Ross AO, a member of the Reserve Bank's Monetary Policy Board, in a lecture at the University of Melbourne on 22 September.