This is a link to a nice conference on the Australian economy which colleagues at the Melbourne Institute ran a week or two ago. Some good presentations (audio links also available). Education session is good – I thought Andrew Leigh gave a great presentation which hits a lot of issues and views that I would share (raise quality and quantity). Ditto innovation. Some of the political speeches are as you would find them anywhere although I thought the Education Minister gave a smart and focused look at what their priorities are in this domain.
The papers by Van Ours and Gregory repeat a point made often here on labour market response – Van Ours nails this as get active in labour market and keep folks at work, nothing is irreversible, this is a crisis response and not a ‘steady state’ labour market strategy so don’t compare to the literature on Active Labour Market Policies which, he agrees, are pessimistic and carry sizable deadweight.
One reply on “A land down under….”
So what to do? Not all the literature on ALMP’s can be based on steady states (after all, why bother with full employment?). So there may be something in that literature that is relevant.
I think a key challenge – and I am not optimistic about this- is the requirement to have joined up policy making. Benefits reform, active labour market policies and minimum wage policy all need to be integrated – there are all sorts of policy complementarities.