ABSTRACT
In the years since the founding of Economic Society, in 1925, the Australasian economics profession has made a respectable contribution to world economic literature. By the turn of the 1990s the economics profession in Australia and New Zealand had shed the Keynesian paradigm and discarded the vestiges of protection, regulation and centralised wage fixation. The profession's disenchantment with the performance of the Australian and New Zealand economies and its despair over the post-war political economy was replaced by optimism and excitement. Nonetheless, the last two decades of the twentieth century were marked by innovations in economic theory and practice. There were also some detours on the road to economic reform; indeed, it became fashionable, towards the end of the century, to talk of reform fatigue. Some economists also questioned the bounty from the reforms. Australian libraries, archives and universities, along with historians of Australian economic thought have done an excellent job in preserving the legacy and work of their forbears.
