Macroeconomic Policy: Some International Lessons for Australia

This paper reviews recent macroeconomic experience outside Australia, especially in the United States, the United Kingdom and continental Europe, and compares it with Australian experience. It discusses booms and recessions, inflation (especially the "credibility" issue), unemployment (cyclical and structural), and exchange rate policy. It also discusses implications for monetarism and rational expectations theories. Two conclusions are that the big remaining problem in Europe and in Australia is structural unemployment, and that Australia was wise to float the dollar and abandon the crisis-prone "fixed-but-adjustable" exchange rate regime.Boom; Inflation; Macroeconomic Policy; Macroeconomics; Policy; Recession; Structural Unemployment; Unemployment