Late last week The Treasury released a new 40 page report on “The productivity slowdown: implications for the Treasury’s forecasts and projections” (productivity forecasts and projections that is, rather than any possible fiscal implications – the latter will, I guess, be articulated in the Budget documents). In short, if (as it has) productivity growth has … Continue reading The Treasury and productivity
The Productivity Commission closes its doors on Thursday and goes out of existence. There have been a couple of recent articles on the demise of the Productivity Commission, and the chair (Ganesh Nana) has even put out his own statement (not exactly compelling) on productivity, and policy options for improving New Zealand’s dismal performance. There … Continue reading Goodbye to the Productivity Commission
In my post on Monday I drew attention (again) to the fact that New Zealand has made no progress at all in reversing the decline in relative economywide productivity (relative to other advanced countries) since what was hoped to be a turning point, with the inauguration of widespread economic reforms after the 1984 election. If anything, … Continue reading Productivity woes….continued
Earlier in the week a journalist asked me for some thoughts on which political party in government had managed the economy better – in overall macroeconomic terms – over the years since we moved to MMP. My initial response was that the answer would be pretty dull. Pressed to write something anyway, I outlined briefly … Continue reading Productivity growth….or lack of it
There is an extraordinary column in the Herald this morning, by their excellent Kate MacNamara (complete with nice biblical allusions in the online version headlines, which may be lost on a younger generation of readers) on the travails of the Productivity Commission. If you can get access, and you care at all about economic policy … Continue reading Productivity Commission, the immigration inquiry etc
Were I writing yesterday’s post now I would word some things differently. Yesterday afternoon the Productivity Commission drew my attention to their supplementary paper called “The wider wellbeing effects of immigration” which – despite the title – turns out to be mainly about core economic dimensions of the issue, including a substantive discussion of some … Continue reading Productivity Commission at sea
As a parent I find it particularly disheartening to observe the near-complete indifference of governments and major political parties that might hope to form governments to the atrocious productivity performance of the New Zealand economy. If the last National government was bad, the Labour or Labour-led governments since 2017 have been worse. It is hard … Continue reading Productivity growth: failures and successes
I’ve written various pieces over the years on the Productivity Commission, both on specific papers and reports they have published, and on the Commission itself. I was quite keen on the idea of the Commission when it was first being mooted a decade or so ago. There was, after all, a serious productivity failure in … Continue reading Productivity, Productivity Commission, and all that
I was reminded again the other day both how (absolutely) poor even advanced countries were not that long ago, but also how (relatively) rich New Zealand was. I was reading a fascinating book on Ireland’s (rather shameful) history in World War Two and stumbled across a snippet suggesting that “there were nearly 170000 licensed radio … Continue reading Productivity, and politicians who no longer care
Tomorrow morning we finally get Statistic New Zealand’s first guess at June quarter GDP. If I’m being critical in that sentence, it is through the use of the “finally” – emphasising just how long (unusually long internationally) the delays are in producing national accounts data – rather than in the word “guess”. I don’t suppose … Continue reading Productivity and GDP
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