Join the new world

It has been quite a while since my last economic update, apologies to those who follow this stuff. I continue to use the great stats produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics to prepare these reports, which is a godsend as I’ve been too busy lately and would probably have stopped manual data collection.

GENERAL OBSERVATIONS

There have been some significant events over the past month or so:

First, VAT was reduced from 15% to 10% on 21 Feb. Thanks to a number of terms of stable borders, relatively strong resource bonuses and sound fiscal management the tax revenue base had grown enough to allow for these tax breaks while still enabling a budget surplus. Together with Minister of Finance James Keane and Advisor venja I put together a set of tax revenue estimates based on a number of scenarios and concluded that even on very pessimistic assumptions the tax cut was affordable. As it turns out our estimates were too pessimistic and tax revenue far exceeded our estimates even with the tax cut (though it should be noted that the cut was delivered mid-term thus the full effect was not taken into account).

Secondly we had a deflationary episode late in February that carried through to the early days of March. General consensus is that the deflation was the result of a temporary admin bot outage (deliberate or otherwise).

NOTE: For those not already familiar there is a significant body of evidence to suggest that the game admins have implemented a market bot that purchases goods from the market at regular intervals though this has not to my knowledge ever been admitted by the admins themselves.

Thirdly the game admins have changed the monetary market rules such that all citizens now operate under a single currency. Though the ‘branding’ of your currency is determined by your citizenship, there is now only one currency market, and every currency has the same gold exchange rate value. Though this has so far had a limited effect on the price of goods it has had a profound effect on the exchange market, probably the topic of a separate article.

WEAPONS


Weapons prices by quality

As noted in my last economic update weapon prices were on the increase during early-mid February. The reduction in VAT on 21st Feb appears to have had a positive effect in reducing inflation in the weapons market. As pointed out in an earlier article by Mudkip McMudkip the full extent of the 5% VAT reduction was passed on to consumers through lower prices.

Any impact of the VAT reduction was however eclipsed by the deflationary effect of the absence of the market bot, with prices dropping dramatically across most weapon markets between 26th Feb and 1st March. Prices are now recovering to a similar level as early February.

FOOD


Food prices by quality

Food prices in general followed a similar trend to weapons prices in most markets, though it appears there was a period between 22nd and 23rd Feb (immediately after then VAT reduction) where Q6 food prices went through the roof. It appears that savvy buyers picked up large quantities of Q6 food immediately after the VAT reduction resulting in all reasonably priced Q6 food being bought out and only insanely priced offers ($1000 per food) remaining on the market. Interestingly Q6 food was largely unaffected by the disappearance of the market bot, adding fuel to the speculation that the bot only operates in low-Q manufacturing markets though this hypothesis is not supported by the weapons market data.


Minimum cost per health

This graph represents the cost per health unit buying the best value food offer on the market. The inflationary trend is clear during February, with price relief coming by way of the VAT reduction. The impact of the market bot’s absence on health cost is very obvious here.

SALARIES


Highest daily salary offer

Salaries have been steadily rising over the past few months, and this trend has continued through February. As one would expect there was a lag between the disappearance of the market bot (around 26th Feb) and reduction in salaries as it can take a few days for reduced profitability to flow through to reduced wages. While salaries have reached the $200 ceiling a number of times over the past few months they have yet to break it by any significant amount.

MAXIMUM HEALTH PER DAY


Maximum health that may be purchased from the highest daily salary offer

This chart shows how much health can be recovered per day working at highest market salary rate while purchasing the best value for money food offer, a key indicator of economic health for new citizens.

After a relatively pessimistic report on this measure last time, we have seen strong growth in this key welfare measure, firstly from the VAT reduction and subsequently from the bot-induced deflation. After nearly reaching the 1000 health per day level we are now back to almost 700, still a strong level.

COMMODITY PRICES


Raw Materials price leve

From the beginning of March the ABS now provide details of Raw Materials prices, thanks Mudkip!

There is far too little data to do any analysis, this is really just to show people it exists for now, stay tuned!

That’s all for this update, time I did some work and helped James with the budget instead of making pretty graphs 😃.