The relationship between labour market conditions and welfare receipt in Australia: A stock-flow analysis

Understanding the determinants of changes in welfare caseloads is an important, but little studied, topic in Australia. This paper evaluates the role of labour market conditions in explaining the changes in the Australian welfare caseload since the late 1990s. The paper employs a stock-flow approach to better control for persistence in welfare receipt and includes different specifications to deal with measurement error in labour market data. The results suggest that the labour market is an important determinant of movements on and off welfare, accounting for the majority of the caseload decline during 1997-2005. The results also highlight the importance of robustness checks when data are measured with error.

Depression prevention, labour force participation and income of older working aged Australians: a microsimulation economic analysis

Depression has economic consequences not only for the health system, but also for individuals and society. This study aims to quantify the potential economic impact of five-yearly screening for sub-syndromal depression in general practice among Australians aged 45-64 years, followed by a group-based psychological intervention to prevent progression to depression.

Differential labour market impacts from disability onset

We estimate the causal labour market impacts of disability onset by gender, age and education levels up to 4 years after onset using longitudinal data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics Australia survey and difference-in-difference propensity score matching techniques. We find lasting negative impacts on employment, especially full-time employment, which is due more to reduced movement into full-time employment than downshifting from full-time to part-time work following onset. Those without post-school education qualifications are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of onset and are more likely to be out of work and on income support than those with qualifications up to 4 years after onset, due in part because they have greater difficulty adjusting.

An era of governance through performance management - New Labour's National Health Service from 1999 to 2010

In 1997, the New Labour government inherited a ‘crisis’ in the UK National Health Service from the outgoing Conservative government. To address this perceived crisis, New Labour offered investment and, contrary to expectations, further neo-liberal health service reforms. In particular, the government extended the scope of performance management beyond financial numbers to encompass all aspects of managerial and organisational performance. Drawing on an analytics of government framework, this paper demonstrates how reforms were framed and given meaning through a framework of hierarchical accountability and centralised control. These panoptical arrangements relied on performance-management technologies of targets and ratings, which were linked to patient choice and a prospective funding system called ‘Payment by Results’. In turn, these top-down technologies disciplined knowledge, identity, and visibility and control of practice.

International education, the formation of capital and graduate employment : Chinese accounting graduates’ experiences of the Australian labour market

Since the late 1970s, international education has steadily gained in popularity in China.An emerging middle class seeks to strengthen its position in China’s rapidly stratifyingsociety under its socialist market economy with the shift from wealth creation for all towealth concentration for a few. Previously, a foreign qualification was considered apassport to success in either the host or home country’s labour market. But the growingpopularity of overseas study, coupled with the massification of the Chinese highereducation, means Chinese international students are seeking to distinguish themselvesin an increasingly competitive global labour market. This longitudinal study of internationalgraduates, backgrounded by Australian employer perceptions, examines thejourneys of 13 Chinese accounting graduates as they attempt to transition from anAustralian university into the Australian labour market. Bourdieu’s thinking tools offield, capital, disposition and habitus are utilised to consider how different cultural,social and linguistic capitals inform employer understandings of ‘employability’ meantChinese accounting graduates significantly adjusted their life goals.

Hard times and the "fact" and "fancy" of modern labour management

Dickens believed that, played out in practical terms, the pursuit of a totally rationalised society devoid of ‘Fancy’ only served to benefit those in power to the impoverishment of those in their charge. He was appalled by a selfish and self-interested philosophy that combined with laissez-faire capitalism to reduce human effort to mere numbers for the sole purpose of determining its monetary worth. His story thus provides a rebuke to the dehumanising effects of utilitarianism and the way it is used to calculate workers in the manner of machines; reducing them to little more than a resource that is no more or less important any other resource used in industrial enterprise. Their modern-day counterparts live in similar Hard Times in being in the grip of laissez-fair economics of global proportions, which visits upon them similar conceptions of their worth, as evidenced by the current precariousness of their employment and their present exposure to the vicissitudes of arbitrary power exercised by managements still wedded to utilitarian principles. As a result, the ‘light of Fancy’ that at one time would periodically burst through in earnest storms of protest, is now refracted into cynical asides directed at rational systems that continue to standardise and homogenise all that ‘counts’ in working life.