James Mahmud Rice

University of Melbourne | MSD · Melbourne School of Population Health

The generational economy—which is that aspect of the economy that pertains to the economic activities of, and the economic relationships between, different ages and generations—can be evaluated on the basis of a number of different criteria. The most critical of these include the financial sustainability of the generational economy, the intergenera...

New estimates of economic flows by age combined with population projections show that in the coming decades (1) global GDP growth could be slower by about 1 percentage point per year, declining more sharply than population growth; (2) GDP will shift toward sub‐Saharan Africa more than population trends suggest; (3) living standards of working‐age a...

Inequality between generations is a central feature of human societies. Moreover, within human societies many institutions have developed that mould and shape intergenerational inequality, including the state. Nevertheless, intergenerational inequality has typically been only loosely defined as a concept. This article examines intergenerational ine...

Australia invested $111.8 billion in education in 2015. The sources of this funding and the pathways it follows through various systems are complex. Rarely are all the components of this system captured in the one place. This report offers a detailed insight into investment in Australian education, capturing data from all levels - from early childh...

Objective: To investigate intergenerational equity in consumption using the Australian National Transfer Accounts (NTA). Methods: Australian NTA estimates of consumption were used to investigate disparities in consumption between people of different ages and generations in Australia between 1981-1982 and 2009-2010. Results: There is a clear pa...

Population ageing through much of the developed world presents the opportunity for a massive transfer of wealth across generations. One important and understudied intergenerational transfer in Australia occurs at or near death through inheritance or inter vivo transfers. In Australia, the number of deaths is projected to increase 13% in 10 years an...

Longer lives and fertility far below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman are leading to rapid population aging in many countries. Many observers are concerned that aging will adversely affect public finances and standards of living. Analysis of newly available National Transfer Accounts data for 40 countries shows that fertility well abov...

Judging from Gallup Polls in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, opinion often changes during an election campaign. Come election day itself, however, opinion often reverts back nearer to where it was before the campaign began. That that happens even in Australia, where voting is compulsory and turnout is near-universal, suggests...

A healthy work-life balance has become increasingly important to people trying to cope with the pressures of contemporary society. This trend highlights the fallacy of assessing well-being in terms of finance alone; how much time we have matters just as much as how much money. The authors of this book have developed a novel way to measure ‘discreti...

Time pressure is a familiar phenomenon. The quantity of spare time people have clearly effects their satisfaction with their leisure and with their life as a whole. But so too, we show, does how much control people have over how much spare time they have. We measure this through an indicator of ‘discretionary time’, which proves to be equally or mo...

Welfare states contribute to people's well-being in many different ways. Bringing all these contributions under a common metric is tricky. Here we propose doing so through the notion of temporal autonomy: the freedom to spend one's time as one pleases, outside the necessities of everyday life. Using income and time use surveys from five countries (...

Welfare states contribute to people's well-being in many different ways. Bringing all these contributions under a common metric is tricky. Here we propose doing so through the notion of temporal autonomy: the freedom to spend one's time as one pleases, outside the necessities of everyday life. Using surveys from five countries (the United States, A...

People’s welfare is a function of both time and money. People can – and, it is said, increasingly do – suffer time-poverty as well as money-poverty. It is undeniably true that people feel increasingly time pressured, particularly in dual-earner households. But much of the time devoted to paid and unpaid tasks is over and above that which is strictl...

Ever since the appearance of Vanek's pioneering article in 1974, there has been a controversy about whether 'labour saving' domestic appliances actually save labour time. Vanek argued that time spent in housework had barely changed since 1926, despite the diffusion of practically every known domestic appliance over this period. Gershuny and Robinso...

Recent years have seen the emergence of a new politics of working time. Industrial relations specialists, welfare agencies and others have raised the idea that increasing levels of overwork and burgeoning levels of unemployment are two sides of the same coin. There have also been concerns that changes in working hours have constrained employees' ab...

To better grasp the likely policy implications of the ageing population, it is important to understand both supply-side and demand-side phenomena associated with the labour market for mature-age workers. This research sheds new light on employers' views of and practices towards older workers. The special qualities of this study can be summarised un...