ABSTRACT

On the criteria established in Chapter 1 and applied in the subsequent chapters, there is plenty of Australian economics. In fact, its recent history (Chapter 8) reveals a veritable explosion in Australian economic research. However, that chapter also noted the growing internationalisation and Americanisation of economics, so that by way of conclusion it may be useful to review the precise characteristics which make an Australian economics. Although nationality of authorship (by residence rather than birth) is a convenient classificatory device without which this history could not have been written, there must be other features attached to Australian economics if this concept is to have a more robust meaning. Concern with typical Australian problems, those of a small, rich, industrial, developing country, or of a “new land”, to use Australian economists' phrases cited throughout this book, was one feature of an Australian economics suggested at the start of this book. Adaptation of overseas principles and theories (rather than their simple adoption) was another such feature to which attention was drawn. In addition, earlier historians have referred to a “golden age” of Australian economics in the 1920s and 1930s, based on the ground that the subject as an academic discipline then “took off” in Australia while from the late 1920s economists as a group were listened to and gave valuable advice to government on tariffs and appropriate policy responses to the world crisis. This period also produced the Economic Society of Australia and New Zealand as a professional organisation for economists and its journal, the Economic Record which disseminated and debated policy questions of relevance to those involved in steering the Australian economy. It also saw the appearance of the first Australian textbooks on economics such as Copland (1931b), Walker and Madgwick (1931) and, a decade later, Gifford (1942) which was hailed as the first Australian text. 1 Last but not least, many but not all of the more uniquely Australian contributions to economics can be traced to this period.