Search

« Back to Publications

Recipe to avoid recession has also kept jobs and wages growth at bay

Greg Jericho comments in The Guardian (11.6.17) on recent economic figures showing a decline in wages growth and jobs numbers in Australia, leading to household income being at a near-fifty year low.

‘When the latest GDP figures were released this week, media outlets around the country (including Guardian Australia) almost unanimously ran with the line celebrating that Australia had gone 26 years without a recession. It’s a worthy historical marker to applaud, but for workers at the moment, the records being broken are unlikely to bring much applause.

‘Twenty-six years without two consecutive quarters of negative growth is certainly a long time (even if, like me, you think that is a daft definition of a recession).

‘Over that period, Australia’s economy has grown almost as well as any other country in the OECD. Of the 26 OECD countries that existed in 1991, only Ireland, South Korea, Turkey and Luxembourg have grown faster than Australia.

‘Avoiding recessions is no small thing – they wreck lives. It took a decade for the percentage of Australian adults in employment to return to pre-1990s recession levels. The 1990s recession led to people in their 50s losing their jobs and not working again. If we had the level of unemployment that was reached in 1992 rather than the current number of 744,000 people unemployed, we would be talking about 1.4m people – that is a lot of families struggling to survive.’

The TJRyan Foundation does not guarantee the accuracy, currency or completeness of any information or material available on this website. The TJRyan Foundation reserves the right to change information or material on this website at any time without notice. Links from this site to external, non-TJRyan Foundation websites should not be construed as implying any relationship with and/or endorsement of the external site or its content by the TJR Foundation, nor any commercial relationship with the owners of any external site. Should any TJRyan research project be funded by an individual or organisation the source of funding will be stated beside the research report. In all other cases contributions are provided on a pro bono basis.
Receive the latest news

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Get notified about new articles

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.