VCE Economics really has one aim. To explain what influences the Standard of Living of Australians. All that you learn can be related to this.
Unfortunately it is not at all clear what 'standard of living' means and you will profit from gaining a good understanding of this early.
There are two ways of looking at the standard of living:
Material standards of living - judged by how many goods and services the population can consume
Non-material standard of living - which relates to the wider quality of life. For example living in the UK means coping with the awful weather month in month out, while the pleasures of Melbourne's climate, whatever you may think of it, means you have a better quality of life. Leisure time and the quality of activities, levels of pollution, stress levels and so on all contribute to non-material living standards.
But how can we measure Standard of Living? As non-material living standards are important GDP alone is not enough. Indeed GDP has many shortcomings and at the very least needs to be converted to Real disposable GDP per capita.
There have been several attempts to measure the standard of living, the Human Development Index is the best known, but Australia has made its own attempt with the Genuine Progress Indicator.
Email me at mark.russell43@hotmail.com for some notes in word format
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