Economic Resilience in a Pandemic: Did COVID-19 Policy Effects Override Industry Diversity Impacts in Australia?

The industry diversity thesis of economic resilience to economic shocks is embedded in community development policy across Australia. The idea being that in the event of an economic shock some industries will prove more recession-proof than others. The greater the industry diversity, the greater the likelihood of off-setting industry effects, resulting in greater economic resilience. The COVID-19 pandemic and the associated restrictions created a unique natural experiment to explore whether the industry diversity thesis holds true under the conditions of a global health pandemic. In this policy paper, we use JobKeeper applications as a proxy for decreased economic resilience. We explore if Australian local government areas (LGAs) with higher industry diversity had less necessity for JobKeeper. We also briefly consider if concentrations of certain industries acted as a better economic buffer to the COVID-19 economic shock. We observe that as diversity increases, economic resilience strengthens except for Victoria (where the association is inverted). This observation has important implications for current and future policy formation and implementation across all layers of government. © 2023 The Authors. Economic Papers;A journal of applied economics and policy published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of The Economic Society of Australia.

Fiscal Policy in the COVID-19 Era1

This paper analyses the COVID recession and the large fiscal policy response by modelling scenarios using a macro-econometric model. The COVID recession mainly arose from lower household consumption of certain services under COVID social distancing. The fiscal response to compensate for income losses in those service industries meant that unemployment was around 2 percentage points lower for 3 years than otherwise would have been the case. However, there was over-compensation: for every $1 of income the private sector lost under COVID, fiscal policy provided $2 of compensation. Following the end of social distancing, the aftereffects of over-compensation and over-prolonged loose monetary policy are modelled to have generated excess demand that temporarily added up to 3 percentage points to the annual inflation rate. Also, three forms of over-compensation in the JobKeeper program that led the fiscal response created disincentive effects and inequities. The primary lesson for future pandemics is that fiscal policy should compensate, but not over-compensate, for income losses, both in aggregate and at the program level. The secondary lesson is that monetary policy needs to take more account of the stimulus already provided by the fiscal response, so that interest rates do not remain very low for too long. © 2023 The Authors. Economic Papers;A journal of applied economics and policy published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of The Economic Society of Australia.

Why the COVID-19 Crisis Is an Ethical Issue for Business: Evidence from the Australian JobKeeper Initiative.

The COVID-19 virus was unveiled to the world as a health crisis and later also as an economic crisis. For some organisations, it has become an ethical crisis. This is certainly the case for large organisations in Australia, where the way many enterprises handled a government wage subsidy called JobKeeper led to a public backlash, media pressure, and a variety of responses ranging from 'We acted legally' to the full return of the subsidy. Some organisations later reported profits, and the public response indicated concern about this behaviour, many considering it immoral despite it being legally compliant. It is, we contend, a question to which stakeholder theory can be applied, examining how organisations view and respond to the public. We use content analysis of mainstream media to provide information about public reactions and information from official sources to confirm corporate action. We show that there is a significant ethical component in the public response to the behaviour of organisations as they respond to the crisis. COVID has been an ethical, health, and financial crisis for these organisations. Public pressure, exerted in and through the media, made the general public a definite stakeholder.

The COVID-19 outbreak and stock market reactions: Evidence from Australia.

We examine how the Australian stock market responded to the uncertainties created by the COVID-19 pandemic and whether the stimulus package offered by the Government helped restore confidence in the market. This study finds a negative stock market reaction to the pandemic announcement, however, among two stimulus packages related announcements, the market reacted positively only to "JobKeeper" package. The cross-sectional results suggest that the smallest, least profitable and value portfolios suffered more during the pandemic. Finally, size and liquidity are found to be the significant drivers of abnormal returns. These results generally hold for a battery of robustness checks.