Economic Rigor

Been lots of talk about electricity bills in Australia. So using CPI data from the ABS (which gives you data about price increases over the years by state, I have calculated the price of an $100 electricity bill in 1980. This should give you a comparison of how much prices in each state has changed over the years. Very interesting.

Been some crazy figures of the economic value of Marriage Equality. People quoting billions of dollars, which is ridiculous. There just aren't that many same sex couples who want to get married to equate to that. Lets apply some economic rigor to proceedings. Firstly, when Marriage Equality occurred in 2001 in the Netherlands, it resulted in an increase in marriages of around 3%, according to statistics Netherlands. So we can basically assume the same increase here. So we will make the assumption that in 2018, there will be an increase of 3% of what there would normally have been. So then, what would the normal number be. Well we have in 2015 from the abs, the total number of marriages being 113595. If we predict the numbers for 2016, 2017 and 2018 to be the 5 year averages, we have the number of  2018 marriages being 118,570. 3% of that would be 3667 same sex marriages in 2018 Now the next question is to value the weddings. in 2011, IBIS valued the wedding ...

Interesting times at the moment in Australia, with the upcoming Marriage equality postal plebiscite about to be commissioned to determine if the marriage definition will change. Been looking at some of the arguments put forward by the "no" case. One of them is that by changing the definition of marriage, the institution itself becomes less relevant, meaning less marriages will occur, which isn't an ideal option. Seems a bit counter intuitive, you would think that by increasing the eligible pool of people that can get married, you would also increase overall marriage rates. But that all depends if people aren't put off marriage by the new eligibility. Anyway, thought I would look at marriage rates in the Netherlands (which has had gay marriage longer than anyone else) to see if there was any impact. So I downloaded marriage and birth stats from Statistics Netherlands, as well as population stats and made a dataset of marriage incidence (per 10,000 people) and ...