Paul Blacklow

A Comparison of Income and Expenditure Inequality Estimates: The Australian Evidence, 1975-76 to 1993-94

This paper compares, using Australian unit record data, income and expenditure inequalities over the period 1975/76 to 1993/94. The study finds inconsistencies between the two inequality movements over much of this period. We, also, observe differences in the nature of income and consumption disparities.

Demographic demand systems with application to equivalence scales estimation and inequality analysis : the Australian evidence

This paper proposes and applies an alternative demographic procedure for extending a demand system to allow for the effect of household size and composition changes, along with price changes, on expenditure allocation. The demographic procedure is applied to two recent demand functional forms to obtain their estimable demographic extensions. The estimation on pooled time series of Australian Household Expenditure Surveys yields sensible and robust estimates of the equivalence scale, and of its variation with relative prices. Further evidence on the usefulness of this procedure is provided by using it to evaluate the nature and magnitude of the inequality bias of relative price changes in Australia over a period from the late 1980s to the early part of the new millennium.

Optimal Commodity Taxes in Australia

The recent changes to commodity taxes in Australia have led to renewed interest in a classic question in public finance: should the tax rates be uniform or differentiated? This article attempts to answer this question by calculating optimal commodity taxes in Australia for a nine-item disaggregation. The estimates point to non-uniform commodity taxes, even from the viewpoint of an inequality-insensitive tax planner. The optimal commodity taxes bear little resemblance with the pre-GST or post-GST tax rates. No less significant is our observation that even the purely efficiency-driven optimal commodity taxes imply lower real expenditure inequality than the actual taxes.