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.