It is election season, and since the performance of the economy enables (or disables) so much of what political parties want to do, or to spend, it is worth having a look at a few charts. There have been plenty on inflation this year, and plenty of fiscal policy in just the last few weeks.

I had an op-ed in The Post and The Press the other day, which touched on some of the old and new economic challenges, the greatest of which – and longest running of which – is the dismal productivity performance of the economy.

I had in mind this, from a post a few weeks ago

I’d wondered how New Zealand had done over just the last 10 years – half spent under National governments and half under Labour governments.

We’ve dropped six ranking places in a club of only 37 members in just a decade. It took me a little bit by surprise, and I think partly because the New Zealand debate (such as it is) rarely focuses on the countries that are now most similar to us in productivity terms.

And for those wanting to play crude National vs Labour partisan games on this one, probably best not. Here is our quarterly data up to Q2 this year, with a simple linear trend through the data. The last few years have been a lot noisier, as you might expect, between (a) Covid disruptions, and (b) the fact that recent data are somewhat provisional and will keep getting revised for the next few years. Note that whatever influence political parties’ policies and practices have on economywide productivity, outcomes don’t just change the day a different party takes office.

A line I’ve banged on about quite a bit over the years is the unbalanced nature of the New Zealand economy, in which growth in production in the tradables sectors has tended to lag behind that in the non-tradables sectors, going back at least 20 years, and the opposite to what one might expect to see in a successful economy gaining ground on other countries it had dropped behind.

Here is the latest version of the summary chart I’ve used for that purpose.

Tradables sector output, per capita, is about where it was 30 years ago. Even if tourism magically quickly recovered to pre-Covid levels, the pre-Covid picture wasn’t really much more encouraging.

In last week’s column I noted

Productivity isn’t primarily about individuals working harder.  It is mostly about having an economy where more firms find it attractive to invest in producing new and better products, to produce old products in better ways, tapping new markets, and by doing so supporting higher incomes across the board.    But business investment here has been weak, as a share of GDP, for a long time.  Nowhere near enough firms are finding anywhere near enough opportunities to enable New Zealand to reverse its sustained relative economic decline. 

I hadn’t checked the comparative business investment numbers for a while but I did this morning

Sure enough, in a country which has had much faster population growth than most OECD countries – and high labour force participation – business investment has been lower as a share of GDP than in most advanced economies. That isn’t what you’d expect to see in a country making any progress at all in reversing the decades of decline. It is, however, consistent with New Zealand’s own dismal record.

And while for a decade or so we managed to support growth in living standards on the back of a rising terms of trade, that was almost a decade ago now. The terms of trade haven’t gone consistently backwards, but they aren’t supporting any further growth in material purchasing power (or the tax base)

I also touched on house prices in that op-ed, observing

House prices are rising again, from levels that are still punishingly high.  In real terms they are materially higher now than when the current government took office, a pattern we’ve seen with successive governments for decades.  Political parties talk about improving housing affordability, but market prices speak louder than politicians’ words. 

What I had in mind was this chart, drawn from the BIS cross-country database of real house prices, going back many decades (in our case to 1970). Assuming Labour loses office this month we won’t have the final data for their term for a while yet, but I’ve allowed another 2.5 per cent real drop from the last published value for the March quarter this year.

Terms of government differ (3, 6, and 9 years) and of course background economic circumstances differ a lot. Often within terms of government there have been both periods of flat or falling real prices and ones of quite material increases. But for more than 30 years, real prices have been rising……really for no other reason than the combination of regulatory and structural policy choices successive governments have made. Parties approaching office like to suggest they have some sort of answers, but they haven’t delivered…..and current market prices (remember, houses are asset prices, trading on all information about the expected future) don’t suggest the likely next government is likely to be much different. Land prices in peripheral areas around our cities certainly aren’t collapsing. (And all this latterly after the steepest quick increase in interest rates for many decades – probably since 1984/85.)

Which brings us back to productivity. Neither main party – one of which will lead the next government – seems to have any serious idea or policies (not even an underlying narrative) that might turn things around and offer a much better (relative to the other countries we increasingly lag behind) tomorrow for our children. Judging by how little the words (“productivity”) or ideas have appeared in debates, manifestos, campaign appearances, it isn’t obvious they really care much. Squabbling over which baubles to offer the voters, and how to pay for them (at a time when the budget is deep in deficit) seems to be where the game is at.

Our poor next generations……