Electricity Bills throughout the years by State

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.

Marriage Equality: Worth $149 million to the Australian economy in 2018

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 industry at $4.3 billion. If we assume the value increased at the rate of inflation, (and using the 5 year average of CPI to value 2018) we have the value of the wedding industry in 2018 to be $4.92 billion.


We then need to find the average wedding value. So we divide the $4.92 billion by the total number of weddings (118,570 + 3667) and we get $40,513 per wedding.


To find the economic value, we then multiply that figure by the 3667 and we get $148,561,171


A big number, but not a billion dollar injection.
 

Does Marriage Equality negatively affect Marriage Incident Rates? Apparently it does in The Netherlands

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 birth incidence (per 10,000 people). Also added a dummy variable indicating Gay Marriage (which began in 2001)
Unfortunately, could only get stats from 1995-2016.







Running a regression, with dependent variable = Marriage Incidence, and independent variables being Birth Incidence and Gay Marriage dummy variable, leads to the following result.





So it does appear that the introduction of Gay Marriage did produce a reduction of 4 marriages per 10,000 people. This is statistically significant at the 95% confidence interval as well.


While it is only a small data set of 22 years, the result should give people pause if they believe marriage is an institution that should be continued. But if you want to accelerate the death of it, vote "Yes".