Future Workforce Skills: Projections with the MONASH Model

Abstract

Since 1993 the Centre of Policy Studies has been using the MONASH model to produce year-by-year forecasts for the Australian economy, typically with forecast horizons of about ten years. MONASH is a large dynamic applied general equilibrium model. The MONASH forecasting system takes as inputs macro-economic forecasts from Syntec Economic Services, forecasts for the agricultural and mining sectors from the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics, forecasts for international tourism from the Bureau of Tourism Research, and scenarios on technical change from extrapolations of recent historical experience. The MONASH model then produces consistent forecasts for 112 industries, 56 regions and 282 occupations. The occupational forecasts give projections of the demand for the ASCO unit groups in each of the six Australian States. These forecasts provide a background for assessing the skills likely to be required in the Australian workforce in the next decade. In this paper we report a selection of our most recent (as at February 1995) forecasts for occupations, and explain how they relate to the macroeconomic and industrial dimensions of the overall forecasts.