I agree it is hard to call them Howard years or Gillard years, if only because many actions that are put in place with one government become the responsibility, curse or benefit of the next
Your quote : Productivity refers to the efficiency with which an economy employs resources (inputs) to produce economic output (goods and services) 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.
In arriving at this figure who decides if the G & S are producing an economic output?
By that I mean that there is a lot of work performed which does not produce any actual output.
In the Murray blog they go through the problems but as I see the problems they are all to theory based.
Just as an example if a firm has twenty employees and produces a thousand widgets a week and then sacks all the workers and buys a new machine with 100% borrowed money and doubles the production, this is measured as being an increase in the productivity.
The methods used are of interest in supplying a basis of comparison between countries but are they accurate? If you were buying the country could you use those figures as an accurate assessment of the health of the country and my opinion is no. Can you use those figures to accurately plan the economy of and future of a country, again I would say no.
