Is there any particular reason to engage in an 'political ideology' based IR debate on HC?
Anyway - Gittins has the issue covered. I have checked his data against the OECD and it holds.
Shock news: no need to worry on productivity
At last instead of jumping to conclusions and riding hobby horses we're making good progress in analysing the causes and cures of the slowdown in our economy's productivity improvement. There's more to it than you may think.
Following the analysis by Saul Eslake for the Grattan Institute we've had a contribution from the Productivity Commission's great productivity expert, Dean Parham, and a synthesis of the state of our knowledge by Patrick D'Arcy and Linus Gustafsson in the latest Reserve Bank Bulletin. Let me tell you what they find.
Productivity refers to the efficiency with which an economy employs resources (inputs) to produce economic output (goods and services). It matters because improvement in productivity is the key driver of growth in income per person - and hence, our material standard of living - in the long run.
The trend in productivity improvement is determined by the development of new technologies and by how efficiently resources - the ''factors'' of production: land, labour and capital - are organised in the production process.
The commonest and easiest way to measure productivity is to measure the productivity of labour. You take the total quantity of goods and services produced in a period and divide it by the total number hours of labour used to produce it, thus giving output per unit of labour input.
Figures for the market economy show labour productivity improved at the annual rate of 1.8 per cent over the 20 years to 1994, then by 3.1 per cent over the 10 years to 2004, then by 1.4 per cent over the seven years to 2011.
