Successive revisions of legislation covering financial institutions encouraged greater cross-pillar competition in some areas, leading to lower costs and improved efficiency. But over the past decade, other countries have caught up and are forging ahead. During this time, two trends changed the global environment for financial institutions. First, with the expansion of world trade, national markets became truly global.
The Reserve Bank and the ABS have been working together to obtain some additional insight into what is happening here. Together we have looked at the wage increases for all the 18,000 individual jobs that the ABS uses to construct the WPI. The results are interesting.