My brother and I both tried quite hard not to be economists. And we both failed fairly miserably.
He’s been busy producing some interesting graphs concerning the two intergenerational reports.
From here to fraternity
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Category Archives: Interesting Graphs
Graphunday – House of Representatives Pie Chart
This gives an average of 58.25 for Labor and 41.75 per cent for the Coalition. Plug these numbers into the election calculator and see what you get.
A pie chart of the “see what you get” with a uniform national 11% swing (normal caveats etc):
The red area of the pie chart is almost large enough to resemble pacman.
Graphaturday – Economic Indicators
The Parliamentary Library released a research paper which divides numerous economic trends up by Governments from Whitlam to Howard. It turns out party hats don’t work so well in analysing these trends.
This is an interesting graph with a nice trend. Economic policy makers over the last forty years can take a bow. When averaged across administrations it shows that governments have had a consistent policy of stabilising inflation until we have the mechanism today where an apolitical body, the Reserve Bank, makes interest rate decisions. There are external influences as well such as the China joining the global manufacturing business and placing deflationary pressures on economies with open trade policies. But by and large it can be argued that reducing inflation has been a successful government economic policy – to the point that Howard is presiding over very stable and low inflation figures.
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Graphaturday – Regional populations
With the national government digging its selective anti-federalist paws into the Tasmanian health system it might be a good time to look at the nationalist (as opposed to federalist) structure of government. This usually takes the form of state abolition; where the states are seen as the unnecessary and duplicative level of government. This view has become increasing popular with all the federal parties in the Australian system and numerous advocacy groups. John August in an online opinion op-ed wrote:
Country residents in NSW joke that NSW means “Newcastle, Sydney and Wollongong” or “NSW Stops at Wagga”.
Often jokes are recognitions of reality, sometimes they are impressions. So how does it stack up?
The joke should probably be that NSW stands for Sydney, Sydney and Sydney. Then again the joke is probably recognition that Sydney’s economic, political and geographical influence is similar to Newcastle’s and Wollongong’s – effectively making a Greater Sydney Region which encompasses newie and the ‘gong. Not surprising as commuting does occur between Sydney-Newcastle and Sydney-Wollongong. The rise of the Central Coast is because of this phenomenon and the improved freeways between Sydney and Newcastle.
But in that graph the rest of NSW is nearly one third of the total population of NSW. So where is this population?
It is pretty spread out and even the regional centres are quite small being around the 35K-25K mark mostly. This probably just proves the NSW is geographically a big state and like most of Australia, the population is heavily urban.
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Distribution of Indigenous Population
That graph is from the 2001 census. One of the problems in Australian politics is that everything is viewed from the national level. From Imagining Australia:
If our Indigenous people comprised one tenth rather than one fiftieth of the population there would be widespread outrage about Indigenous disadvantage.
Yet indigenous people in the NT should be well catered for democratically as they are a significant minority making up over a quarter of the population. Unsurprisingly NT politics is very conscience of indigenous issues.
So why are the feds digging in the NT? Looks like a local issue to me.
If States Were Nations
California contributes approximately 14% of of the US GDP. If it were a nation its economy would rank just behind China’s and Italy’s for size.
New South Wales contributes 33.1% of Australian GDP. Victoria is next with 24.2%, Queensland with 18.9% and Western Australia with 12.3%. The remainder are in single figures.
If New South Wales was a nation it would be the 28th largest economy on the planet; bigger than South Africa or Greece and rivaling Poland, Austria and Norway.
I have put NSW and California on a graph in red. A larger version of the graph can be viewed here.
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Positive Interstate Migration (or the lack of)
The graph is from the ABS’ population statistics from June 2006. Queensland and Tasmania are the only ones that people are migrating too on a positive basis and Tasmania barely so. The migration to Queensland is mainly Novacumbrians where 289,000 moved to Queensland between 2001 and 2006 which to put in perspective is more than the population of the Northern Territory.
All the states showed population growth in 2006 with Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory having the greatest increases – which we would expect because of their booming economies – but of the increase in Western Australia half were births and the other half was international migration.
One of the policy descriptors for the isolated Indigenous Communities is for them to pack up and head to the cities where there are jobs and economic opportunities. From this data urban Australians don’t seem to do that. Given the two step economy we would expect some sort of net interstate migration west and north. But it isn’t there.