‘Poverty in a time of prosperity‘, Inside Story, 15 September 2013
Over the past forty years the economic fortunes of Australian households have fallen into two fairly distinct periods. In the “disappointing decades” of the 1970s and 1980s, to use economist Bob Gregory’s label, real wages stagnated, unemployment increased fourfold and male full-time employment as a proportion of the population fell by 25 per cent. Since 1991, by contrast, Australia has been one of the fastest-growing advanced economies in the world, enjoying twenty-one years of unbroken economic growth and largely escaping the global financial crisis, or the Great Recession as it is still known in Europe and the United States.
The author wrote this article on inequality and a further article commenting on the 2014 budget from an inequality perspective.
