Ross Gittins
Ross Gittins is economics editor of the SMH and an economic columnist for The Age. His books include Gittins' Guide to Economics, Gittinomics and The Happy Economist.
Ross Gittins
Reform is a delicate act of balance
Ross Gittins A lot of the problems the nation struggles with and argues over boil down to the considerable potential for conflict between what economists summarise as ''equity'' and ''efficiency''.
Ross Gittins
Big companies' tax avoidance blatant and shameless
Ross Gittins Paying your fair share is anathema to multinationals.
Ross Gittins
Eat, drink … and get on the treadmill
Ross Gittins Forgive me for saying so, but don't you think you'd be better off going for a run - or even a brisk walk - than reaching for another mince pie? (The ones my wife made this year were irresistible.)
Ross Gittins
Opportunity knocks, but the door has to open both ways
Ross Gittins When governments make grand policy unveilings, as Julia Gillard has with her white paper on the Asian Century, it's terribly tempting for people in jobs like mine to sit back and criticise.
Ross Gittins
If reform isn't balanced, it's self-interest
Ross Gittins Do efficiency and progress necessarily mean we have better lives all round?
Ross Gittins
Workers, bosses can be on the same side
Ross Gittins When Peter Reith replaced Labor's Industrial Relations Act with the Workplace Relations Act in 1996, he changed the act's principal objective from the ''prevention and settlement of industrial...
Ross Gittins
Change is the price of affluence
Ross Gittins When I was a kid marbles were the rage. When you played at home with your brothers and sisters, mum made sure that, whoever won, everyone got their marbles back when the game was over.
Ross Gittins
This is no Sunday school: prosperity comes with pain
Ross Gittins Discord and suffering are the price we pay for getting richer.
Ross Gittins
Carbon tax won't hurt much but we don't want to know
Ross Gittins When psychologists study those sects that predict the end of the world on a certain day, they find the leaders rarely willing to admit they were wrong and their true believers rarely willing to admit...
Ross Gittins
Shift minds on a tax? Unlikely
Ross Gittins People who feel carbon tax is terrible will continue to think this way, whatever the reality.
Ross Gittins
Rates gap a fair price to pay for safer banks
Ross Gittins As I'm sure you've gathered, a surprising number of our industries are going through a painful, job-shifting process economists euphemistically refer to as ''structural adjustment''.
Ross Gittins
With friends and neighbours you're the richest man in town
Ross Gittins We live in the age of the city. A year or two ago we passed the point where half the world's population was now living in urban areas.
Ross Gittins
Suits us to be deluded on climate
Ross Gittins We justify doing nothing on emissions by insisting that others make cuts first. They have. We're the laggards.
Ross Gittins
Stop beating about the bush and talk about Big Australia
Ross Gittins Something significant has happened in this hollow, populist election campaign: the long-standing bipartisan support for strong population growth - Big Australia - has collapsed.
Ross Gittins
Four big bugs threaten our comfort zone
Ross Gittins Two weeks ago the Secretary to the Treasury, Dr Ken Henry, delivered a momentous speech on ''The Shape of Things to Come'' for Australia.
Ross Gittins
It pays to put happiness on a pedestal
Ross Gittins What is the role of government? What do our politicians imagine they're there to do? To put it at its broadest, I think most of us would say the role of government is to advance the wellbeing of...
