In September 2023, the Australian Government issued a comprehensive White Paper on Jobs and Opportunities. It contained a labour market reform agenda, based on a year of taskforce programme planning in the wake of the September 2022 tripartite Jobs and Skills Summit. The White Paper states that the government is ‘working to create an economy where everyone who wants a job is able to find one without having to search too long. These should be decent jobs that are secure and fairly paid’ (p. vii).
Following an overarching economic analysis, the White Paper sets out a five-pillar productivity agenda and roadmaps for a ten-year programme of reform, amplified in detailed taskforce reports, for example, on women’s economic equality and the care and support economy.
This is a call for papers evaluating the White Paper’s analysis of the Australian economy, and the Agenda inherent in its detailed reform programme. We welcome evaluations of the overarching economic assumptions – for example, the prospects for reform within neoliberal policy constraints – and assessments of proposals to achieve reform in specific areas. We welcome papers that use a multi-disciplinary approach to policy questions.
Papers may address the following issues, amongst others:
Prospects for full employment: markets or government intervention?
Policies to achieve full employment in a neoliberal economy
Underlying productivity assumptions, including prospects for technology changes and skills deepening
The road to jobs that are safe, secure, fairly paid, and beneficially flexible, including specifically for First Nations people, women, young people, or migrants
Reforms to the industrial regulation of wages
Approaches to skills development
Policies for the care and support economy
Deadlines
This is an ongoing theme which we plan to publish continually online as papers are received and accepted. A critical mass of articles will be assembled for the December 2024 (35/4) issue. Papers published earlier will be available in First View.
The final submission date for inclusion in the December 2024 collection is 1 June 2024.
Submission process
Submissions should be within the journal’s scope. Please see https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-economic-and-labour-relations-review .
Submissions should conform to house style. The journal’s formatting requirements can be found at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-economic-and-labour-relations-review/information/author-instructions.
All papers will be double-blind peer-reviewed, and ideally no more than 8,000 words in length.
Guest editor: PN (Raja) Junankar
Professor PN (Raja) Junankar was born and brought up in India. He has a PhD from the University of Essex and has held substantive and visiting teaching and research positions at universities in the UK, USA, Canada, India, France, and Sudan. He was a Reader in Economics in the Public Policy Program, at Australian National University from 1988 to 1997 and Professor of Economics at Western Sydney University from 1998 to 2009. He is now an Emeritus Professor at the University of Western Sydney and an Honorary Professor at the Industrial Relations Research Centre, UNSW Business School. He edited The Economics of Unemployment (4 volumes, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2000), and more recently published his single-authored three-volume set, Economics of the Labour Market: Unemployment and the Costs of Unemployment; Development Economics: The Role of the Agricultural Sector in Development; and The Economics of Immigration: The Impact of Immigration on the Australian Economy (all Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). He has been a consultant for the European Commission, the OECD, the International Labour Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, the Economic Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN), the Indonesian Government and various government agencies in Australia. His current research interests are in the fields of labour economics (especially unemployment and long-term unemployment), immigration, informal labour markets in developing countries, and macroeconomics.
For more information raja.junankar@unsw.edu.au or a.junor@unsw.edu.au
