PREDICTIONS OF THE AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL GRANTS TO THE STATES

The Australian Government uses the Commonwealth Grants Commission (CGC) to advise on how much Federal money should be re-distributed to each of the States each year. The Commonwealth Grants Commission uses a complex process of assessing how much each state needs, and their revenue raising capacity. This book provides an assessment of the CGC methods, and provides a much simpler method using a regression analysis. The method suggested provides similar results to those calculated by the CGC. The final recommendation from the book is that the CGC uses a more complex method every five years, to re-assess the base distribution to each of the States; but then use the regression method suggested in this book to provide more certainty, stability and predictability to the grant distributions for each State.