Productivity

NZ and Australia

Michael Reddell Australia, New Zealand economic performance, Productivity

In a couple of weeks it will be 2023. And then in a couple of years it will be 2025.

Those with longish geeky memories may recall that there was once talk of closing the gap between New Zealand and Australian incomes/productivity by 2025. Without any great enthusiasm no doubt, the incoming National government led by John Key agreed to ACT’s request for a (time and resource-limited) official 2025 Taskforce that would offer some analysis and advice on what it would take to achieve such a goal. The Taskforce’s first report had been dismissed by the Prime Minister before it was even released and after the second report the Taskforce was quietly disbanded. I held the pen on the first report and had some input on the second one (itself written by the current chair of the Reserve Bank Board), and since the reports were written when my kids were very young and I still held some vague hope that they might grow up into a first world country that goal of catching Australia has stayed with me, as has the disillusionment with our political and bureaucratic classes who, no doubt comfortable themselves, seem to have lost all interest. It need hardly be repeated – I’ve made the point often enough – that, despite all its mineral riches, Australia is not a stellar productivity performer, so aiming to catch them was hardly reaching for the stars.

My preferred summary metric for such comparisons is real GDP per hour worked. It isn’t the only meaningful national accounts measure but (for example) it isn’t thrown around by the vagaries of commodity price (terms of trade) fluctuations which, especially in economies like ours, are exogenous variables our governments can’t do a lot about. In 2007, just prior to the last recession, OECD estimates have Australian real GDP per hour worked about 23 per cent higher than that in New Zealand.

What has happened since? On that same (annual) OECD metric the gap last year was about 31 per cent.

The ABS produces an official quarterly series of real GDP per hour worked. SNZ does not, but it does publish two measures of real GDP (production and expenditure) and both the HLFS hours worked series and the QES hours paid series. Over time the various possible New Zealand productivity growth measures tend to converge (as they should), but at any point in time the estimates for the most recent few years can and often do diverge quite substantially. Here is a chart with the most recent data.

Covid has probably only compounded the situation, both because measuring what actually happened to GDP over the disrupted last three years is more than usually challenging and because hours worked and hours paid series will have diverged in ways that make sense but hadn’t really been anticipated. In doing charts like this I used to simply work on the basis that the two were just roughly the same thing, each measured noisily and so averages would usually be the least bad way to go. But then governments compelled people to stay at home (often not able to work) and yet funded employers to enable them to be paid. Hours paid held up in lockdowns even as hours worked fell away. More recently of course there is a lot more sickness than usual – for much of which people will have been paid, but may not have worked.

I still don’t have any particular reason to favour one GDP measure over the other, but the HLFS hours actually worked (self-reported) seems a better denominator for labour productivity estimates at present. Here is that line, together with the official Australian series.

And here is the same chart just for the Covid period

The New Zealand series is much more volatile, but count me a bit sceptical for both countries. Go back one chart and it looks as if productivity growth in both countries has been faster during the Covid period than in the previous half-dozen years, and that doesn’t make a lot of sense. There are plenty of puzzles about how the economy has performed over the last three years – starting with what everyone missed and got wrong on inflation – but if “true” labour productivity growth really accelerated over the Covid period that should spark a lot of future research papers.

I remember back in 2020 people suggesting that (eg) that lift in reported productivity in Australia in June 2020 might have been because (eg) the shock to tourism saw a lot of very low wage workers not working, so simply averaging up productivity for the rest. But a couple of years on both countries have very high labour force participation rates and very low unemployment rates (relative to history Australia even more so than New Zealand). And we’ve had huge (probably largely inevitable) policy and virus uncertainty, and it isn’t many years since economics commentary used to full of talk of the damage that increased (policy) uncertainty would cause. And when supply chains have been disrupted, and people haven’t been able to foster face-to-face connections globally, it isn’t usually a climate considered most conducive to productivity growth. It isn’t as if productivity growth in these estimates has been stellar, but it is a bit puzzling. Perhaps where we are now the numbers are just flattered by overheated economies. Perhaps it will all end revised a way anyway, but for now at least (a) both countries have had a bit more productivity growth in the data that might have been expected, and (b) over the Covid period, the gap between New Zealand and Australia does not appear to have gotten any wider.

As I noted earlier, for commodity exporting countries, fluctuations in the terms of trade are largely exogenous. But, unfortunately for New Zealanders, whether one starts one’s comparison 15 years ago just before the last big recession or focuses just on the last couple of years, Australia’s terms of trade has performed better than New Zealand’s.

Indications from the Australian government that it is going to make it easier for New Zealanders to move to Australia is great for young New Zealanders, opening up higher income opportunities that have been harder to access in recent years. It isn’t so good for a community of people who choose to dwell in these islands. But there is no sign either main political party actually cares enough to think hard about overhauling policy here in a way that might one day mean New Zealand might offer the world-matching living standards it did not that many decades ago.

Something a bit odd in the data

Michael Reddell Productivity

I haven’t had time to look closely at last week’s GDP data, but as a last post for the year I thought I’d have a very quick look at the productivity (real GDP per hour worked) numbers that the various recent SNZ releases (national accounts and HLFS) suggest.

Over the years, I’ve often used as a proxy – SNZ not publishing an official series – a measure calculated by averaging the two quarterly GDP measures and dividing them by (an index from) an average of hours worked from the HLFS and hours paid from the QES. But in periods of lockdowns you really don’t want to be using hours paid, because things like the wage subsidy schemes were designed to get people paid even if they weren’t able to work, or their firm wasn’t able to generate much output. So in this chart I’ve simply used the average of the two GDP measures and the HLFS measure (self-reporting respondents) of hours worked.

This one starts from back just prior to the 2008/09 recession. As you see, the decade or so leading up to Covid wasn’t a good time for labour productivity growth in New Zealand (something not much more than 0.5 per cent per annum). And then came Covid and all the disruptions (and policy stimulus).

prod dec 21

Here is the same chart starting just prior to Covid (2019Q4).

prod dec 21 2

Perhaps unsurprisingly there has been quite a lot of variability in this measure of productivity, in ways that really don’t make a great of sense (to me).    There is always some variability –  one reason for using average measures –  but you can see from the first chart that the last couple of years look quite different, so far.  That “so far” is important, as there will be revisions to the GDP numbers for several years to come –  although none to the hours numbers (and who really knows how people were answering in lockdowns).

But if you believe these numbers –  and I recommend that you don’t –  we appear to have found the elixir of New Zealand productivity growth.  First take a global pandemic, then shut the borders, ease monetary policy, throw lots of government money at things, mess up the housing market further, compound it all with huge uncertainty from month to month (sometimes week to week).

Something just doesn’t ring true.  Sure, people find smart ways of doing things from home, but generally you’d have to assume that if the new ways were so great as to be better than what went before in 2019 they’d have been done then.  And no doubt macro policy has given a big boost to overall demand, activity, employment and hours….but this is a productivity measure, and whatever the boost was you’d normally think it would lift demand for people who on average were less productive than what went before.

There are always averaging effects –  in lockdowns perhaps some of the least productive people are disproportionately those who can’t work (waiters, motel cleaners etc) –  but….the picture was already looking surprisingly strong in Q2 this year, when there were hardly any domestic restrictions.

I just don’t believe that the picture represents reality, and that somehow productivity growth has –  after all these decades – started to accelerate.  There have been no micro policies working in that direction –  rather the opposite –  and no one really supposes that forcing businesses not to interact with overseas customers and suppliers etc face to face is good for medium-term productivity.  Add to that all the supply chain problems –  even the small weirdness that USPS no longer delivers to New Zealand –  and it suggests we should be pleasantly surprised if the level of labour productivity now is not lower than it was two years ago.  It just doesn’t make sense to think it is so much higher.  All else equal, the GDP estimates –  and that is all they are, in tough times for measurement and estimation –  look too high.

On which note, I will end the blogging year.

It has been a year of many fewer posts than in most since the blog began.  That was largely down to me getting a cold back in May 2020 from which I never fully recovered, graduating into what the doctor eventually diagnosed (labelled as) chronic fatigue syndrome.  By the standards of what one reads or hears of other people I had a mild version, but for long periods that meant I wasn’t good for much beyond the day to day basics, and sitting in front of a screen for even half an hour was at times astonishingly draining.  An attempt to walk much further than round the block could knock me back, sometimes for weeks.  I’m still not 100 per cent –  still need naps most afternoons – but seem to getting close; perhaps 90 per cent of normal, which is a considerable relief all round.

Having said that I don’t suppose I will drift back into a routine of a post each week day. Posts two or three times a week, supplemented with charts/links on Twitter, seems to be a useful and workable model for now.

Half a million a head

Michael Reddell New Zealand economic performance, Productivity

In yesterday’s post I drew attention – yet again – to New Zealand’s continued drop down the international productivity league tables. There are all sorts of caveats to the details – PPP comparisons are inevitably imprecise, and the data are subject to revisions – but few seriously doubt that we do much worse now relative to other advanced countries than we did just a few decades ago.

But it is easy to lose sight of what the numbers actually mean for ordinary New Zealanders, so I thought today I might do just a short stylised illustration.

In yesterday’s post – as on various occasions in the past – I’ve contrasted our outcomes with those of a group of highly successful OECD countries (but excluding Norway (oil), Ireland (even their own authorities don’t use GDP as a measure of Ireland’s outcomes) and Luxembourg): Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium, the United States, Sweden, Austria, France, Netherlands and Germany. They can be thought of these days as some sort of “leading bunch”, at least as regards labour productivity.

In 1970, when the OECD data start, our real GDP per hour worked was about 82.5 per cent of the median for this group of countries. By 1990 that proportion was about 64.5 per cent.

In 1990 the confident hope – among officials and ministers, and more than a few outsiders – was that we were on the brink of turning things around. I’ve shown before this photo of then Finance Minister David Caygill’s aspirations/expectations.

caygill 1989 expectations

Let’s suppose it had worked.

The fall in our performance relative to that OECD leading bunch had taken 20 years, so suppose that over the following 20 years we had steadily improved such that by 2010 our real GDP per hour worked was again about 82.5 per cent of that of the leading bunch, and then held at that ratio subsequently. That wouldn’t have made us a stellar performer, but at least on the OECD’s numbers we’d be doing about as well as Canada and a little better than Australia. Since we’d more or less tracked Australia for many decades earlier it wouldn’t have been an unrealistic aspiration at all.

How much difference would it have made?

There are lots of possible moving parts, but I did this little exercise by taking as my starting point actual real GDP per capita for New Zealand each year over the last 30 years and scaling it up by the ratio of the assumed productivity performance to our actual. Fortunately the official GDP per capita series starts in 1991.

This is what the chart looks like.

scenario productivity 1

By the end of the period, the annual difference – per man, woman, and child – is about $20000.

But what does it add up to? After all, every year since 1991 our incomes could have been higher than they were. And $1000 extra from 1991 invested even just at a real government bond rate adds to quite a lot by now (especially given New Zealand’s interest rates over that period). Applying a (stylised) series of real interest rates – falling over time – and applying them to each year’s difference in real GDP per capita, the total difference came – in today’s dollar terms – to a bit over $500000 per man, woman, and child. For almost everyone in New Zealand that would be serious money.

You could produce a different number with different scenarios. Slower convergence would, of course, produce a lower number. On the other hand, using the sort of discount rate The Treasury requires government agencies to use – rather than just a long-term real interest rate – would value past gains more highly and produce a materially bigger number.

The point also is not to suggest that if somehow economic policy had been run better and produced these stronger productivity outcomes that everyone would have banked all the proceeds and be sitting today on an extra nest-egg of $0.5 million. That wouldn’t have happened at all. In a more productive economy, people would have been able to – and no doubt would have- consumed more. Government revenues would have been stronger, and better public services might have followed even at the same tax rates. Some might have chosen to work less (a real gain to them too). The half million is a way of putting a number to the options that much better performance would have created. And the gains would be mounting further every single year. Another way of putting that is that every single year, the failure of successive governments means a median family of five is missing out on another $100000.

To repeat, this exercise is entirely stylised. Depending on one’s view of which set of policies might have delivered these better outcomes. some other things might have been very different. Perhaps our terms of trade would have been different (since probably a somewhat different mix of products). Perhaps our real interest rates would have been closer to world levels. Perhaps…perhaps. The point is simply that decades of economic failure adds up to really large amounts of income (and potential consumption) just lost. In New Zealand’s case, half a million per capita will do to be going on with, mounting at $20000 per capita with each year we languish so far behind the bunch.

And just think of how much better off our country would be – avoiding all the systematic and deeply unjust redistributions – if over the same period successive governments also had not so badly messed up the land market, in a way that has delivered us such extraordinary house prices.

What might have been……

But what still could be if there were to be a government of courage and vision.

Pushing down the league tables

Michael Reddell New Zealand economic performance, Productivity

Next Monday morning in Paris, the OECD’s Economic and Development Review Committee will be gathering to discuss the draft of the latest Economic Survey of New Zealand. These mid-level public servants will pose some questions, offer some observations (some insightful, most probably not), and their French and Hungarian members will lead the questioning and – if the past is any guide – get to enjoy a very nice lunch at the New Zealand Embassy. Some weeks later, after the text has been haggled over line by line, we will get to see what the OECD has to say about our economic performance and policies.

But in many respects, the numbers speak for themselves, and the OECD does a pretty good job – one of the useful things it does – of collating and making accessible a wide range of data for its member countries.

The OECD’s series of labour productivity data (real GDP per hour worked (in PPP terms)) starts from 1970. New Zealand joined the OECD in 1973 when it was a club of 24 countries. For all but two (Austria and Greece) of those countries there are labour productivity estimates back to 1970. By 1970, New Zealand had already dropped a bit below the median OECD country, but the countries either side of us were France and the United Kingdom, and we were just slightly behind Germany.

In relative terms, New Zealand’s economic performance was particularly bad in the 1970s. Of those 22 OECD countries for which there was a consistent series of data, over the course of the 1970s New Zealand’s real GDP per hour worked fell from about 95 per cent of that of the median country to about 75 per cent. By 1980 only four of those countries had lower labour productivity than we did, and we were no longer between the UK and France but between Ireland and Finland. To younger readers, Ireland may not sound too bad, but Ireland in those days was still an underperforming economic backwater.

Things didn’t look too different in 1990. The number of countries for which there is data had increased a bit and of the 1973 membership we now stood between Japan and Greece.

The 1990s was an era of opening-up. A variety of countries re-emerged from the ashes of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, other countries formerly under the thumb of the Soviet Union began turning themselves into market economies. And the OECD itself started to broaden its membership, looking to Asia and Latin America for new members. That process has continued and there are now 38 OECD countries, and (more importantly for this post) labour productivity data for all of them since at least 2000.

In 2000, 17 of those 38 countries had average labour productivity lower than New Zealand’s. We were still between Greece and Japan.

By 2010, 16 of those 38 countries were below New Zealand. By then we stood between Greece and Slovenia, the first of the former eastern-bloc states to match us.

So far, so mediocre.

But what about the more recent period? 2020 marked the end of another decade.

It takes many many months to get a complete set of annual data (and, of course, many of those numbers – including our own – are still subject to revision). But the full set of 2020 estimates is now available.

I have been quite hesitant about using 2020 data for anything other than Covid purposes. Countries had quite diverse Covid experiences – some good (bad) luck, some good (bad) policies etc but most of any differences probably not telling us much about the longer-term economic performance story. And measurement was a real challenge – both GDP and hours worked. Bear those caveats in mind in what follows, but looking at the data (and checking against trends to 2019) the distortions seem less than I might have thought/feared.

Here is how things looked in this snapshot.

OECD GDP phw 2020

Only 9 countries now do less well than us, and we are bracketed between Korea and Poland (for all the hype around Korea’s economic performance – and it is impressive over several decades – only now has their average labour productivity matched that of underperforming New Zealand). Former laggards Turkey, Slovakia, Slovenia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic and Estonia have now moved past us – some well past us – and mostly just in this last decade.

And if you think this is just a story about other countries doing really well – which we shouldn’t begrudge for a moment, it is something to celebrate – bear in mind that on these estimates New Zealand’s productivity growth rate in the 2010s was less than it was in the 1970s. That’s the New Zealand of Key, English and Ardern – oh, and record terms of trade – managing to underperform the New Zealand of Kirk, Rowling and Muldoon.

If that chart is bleak enough about New Zealand’s standing in the OECD league tables, just think where it might be a few years from now. It is good of the OECD to have welcomed in the four Latin American members – the diversity hires – who will keep New Zealand off the very bottom of the league table for a long time. If Chile is managing pretty good productivity growth. Mexico in 2020 had real GDP per hour worked no higher than it had been in 2000.

But of the five countries below us last year, three are likely to go past us in the next few years.

the next three

Portugal could pass us too, but they’ve been just slightly behind us for 30 years now.

2025 was once – briefly – the year when we were supposed to have caught up with Australia by. Instead, most likely, on this metric the only OECD countries that will be doing worse than us will be Portugal, Greece, and the four Latin American members that don’t even make most lists of advanced economies.

What a woefully bad set of outcomes successive waves of politicians and officials have delivered for New Zealanders. (All while they’ve delivered us some of the most expensive housing anywhere.) And what is perhaps most depressing is that none of this seems to bother either side of politics, and neither political parties nor (so far as we can tell) officials seem to have any real interest in reversing decades of underperformance. These outcomes aren’t some exogenous given, but the outcome of repeated sets of policy choices. And if the policy choices of the previous government in this area were bad (and they were) those of the current lot seem materially worse (exemplified in recent days by the tens of billions of taxpayers’ money they want to spend on glorified trams, as if money were no object).

Incidentally, lest anyone be under the illusion that Australia itself is some sort of success story, Australia (7th in the OECD in 1970) is now close to the middle of the league table – much better than New Zealand, but not exactly a multi-decade success story.

There is a group of countries near the left hand side of the first chart – from Switzerland to Germany – that I’ve often contrasted us with. Even in 1970 we were behind all of them on this measure (basically level-pegging with France). But now, to catch up with the median of those countries it would require a 69 per cent lift in New Zealand average labour productivity.

It could be done – it would take productivity growth averaging 1.3 per cent per annum faster than in those countries for 40 years – but it isn’t going to happen by simply ignoring the issue, hoping for different outcomes, or by adopting sets of policies that are only likely to continue our decades of relative decline.

Inconsistent with the scale of the challenge

Michael Reddell New Zealand economic performance, OECD, Productivity, Productivity Commission

A few weeks ago I received an invitation from the OECD to this (Zoom) event

Going for Growth is one of the OECD’s flagship economics publications in which, among other things, they identify for each member country what their indicators and models suggest should be structural reform priorities. As the title suggests, the focus is – or at least used to be – productivity, labour market utilisation and the like. The latest New Zealand note, released in May, is here. There is often a fuller treatment in the OECD’s Economic Survey for each country, which they are working on now, having done the rounds (by Zoom) of New Zealand officials and other people (me included) a couple of months back.

Yesterday’s event had potential. The Director of the OECD’s Economics Department spoke, as did one Productivity Commissioner for each of New Zealand and Australia, and then three non-government economists (two from Australia, one from New Zealand), followed by questions from the audience. I wasn’t able to stay to the end, but heard all but one of the presentations (and the one I missed was by an Australian bank economist, presumably focused on Australia). They said that a recording of the event will be posted on the OECD website but as of this morning it didn’t yet appear to be there.

First up was Luiz de Mello from the OECD. With the New Zealand note having opened highlighting how far behind productivity lags in New Zealand one might have hoped for far-reaching policy suggestions. Instead, we got a boringly familiar list, most of which make sense but – realistically – none (individually or collectively) offer the prospect of dramatic macroeconomic change. De Mello was speaking about both New Zealand and Australia, and given how far behind Australia New Zealand average productivity lags that probably further limited the value. Anyway, his list was as follows:

  • he highlighted a component of the OECD’s Product Market Regulation (PMR) indices, suggesting that for both New Zealand and Australia licences and permits (presumably cost or timeliness) were much more of an obstacle than in the top 5 OECD countries (Australia worse than New Zealand),
  • he highlighted the bad scores both countries get on the OECD FDI restrictiveness index (New Zealand worse than Australia)
  • he highlighted the variance in PISA scores, which is higher in New Zealand and Australia than in most small advanced countries and the UK (having, somewhat to my surprise given our slide down the PISA rankings, noted in the report itself that New Zealand “educational achievement is high on average”.
  • he highlighted how high housing expenditures are relative to the OECD for the bottom quintile, and
  • he highlighted the OECD’s view that too much of greenhouse gas emissions in both Australia and New Zealand were “underpriced”.

Beyond that, they seemed keen on a large social safety net –  addressing “child poverty” directly, and smoothing the income of the unemployed.

Most commentators in New Zealand probably think the government has done little useful structural reform –  with a growth/productivity focus –  but the OECD begs to differ, talking in their final paragraph of the “significant actions” taken in recent years in key priority areas.  Weird housing tax measures, for example, seem to win favour from an organisation that used to favour neutrality in the tax system.

So the session wasn’t off to a great start at this point.  Whatever your view on pricing emissions, increasing those prices is not going to boost incomes and productivity, and the other four items – while each no doubt pointing towards useful possible reforms –  are simply not likely to be game-changers.

The next speaker was one of the New Zealand Productivity Commission members, Gail Pacheco.  She too started with a bow to history, highlighting our decades of languishing productivity performance.  She chose to pick up some points from a couple of the Commission’s recent reports.  From the Future of Work she noted, reasonably enough, that New Zealand probably did not have enough technology and that a successful New Zealand economy would see more technology adaptation and diffusion, but she offered no thoughts on what changes in the economic policy environment might create conditions in which firms would find such investment worthwhile.  She seemed more interested in the Commission’s social insurance idea –  now being picked up by the government –  which would pay more to people unemployed at least in their first few months of unemployment.     There might be a case for such a policy – I’m pretty ambivalent –  but in a country where it is not that hard to close business and lay off staff, it has never been obvious (and Pacheco made no effort to elaborate yesterday) how this had anything to contribute to creating a climate supporting higher business investment and stronger productivity growth.

She then moved on to the recent Frontier Firms report and briefly ran through a list of things she thought would help, including

  • significant (government?) investment in a handful of chosen focus areas/sectors,
  • coordinated effort across government
  • everyone working together across the wider community,
  • transparent and adaptive implementation,

all of which, she claimed, would lead to (the current government’s mantra) a “more sustainable, inclusive and productive” economy.

Now, in fairness, each speaker did not have a great deal of time, but there was nothing in Pacheco’s speech that suggested that she had got anywhere near the heart of the issue, had any real sense of the market and private sector, or saw the answers as anything more than well-intentioned (we hope) ministers and Wellington officials trying more (seemingly) smart interventions, preferably without pesky disagreement or robust accountability (she talked of long-term predictable policies).

Pacheco was followed by one of the Australian Productivity Commissioners, Jonathan Coppel, who seemed to have a rather more robust grasp of the economy.    Interestingly –  to me anyway, it wasn’t his point –  he opened with a chart using new historical estimates suggesting that New Zealand’s decline (relative to both Australia and the US) can be dated earlier than Pacheco suggested or than the previous Maddison estimates suggested.  His point was that Australia has made no real progress in closing their (smaller) productivity gaps to the US –  US 30 per cent ahead of Austraia – repeating a line often heard out of Australian recently that the 2010s were the worst decade for Australia –  growth of GNI per capita –  for six decades.  He seemed keen to stress the importance of building on the reforms of the 80s and 90s, rather than discarding them, but it wasn’t that obvious how his suggestions – reduced reliance on income taxes, good regulatory practice, and a focus in post-school education/training on competition and lifelong learning –  were likely to be equal to the task.   He did stress the idea that economists needed to do more communicating with, and persuading the public, re the case for change, not leaving everything to the politicians. 

The next speaker was an Australian private sector economist, Melinda Cilento who –  she spoke very fast –  had a long list of things she wanted in Australia, almost all of which seemed peripheral re longer-term productivity, and several of which were simply out and out redistribution (for which there may or may not be a good case in Australia).

The final speaker I heard was Paul Conway, formerly of the Productivity Commission and now chief economist of the BNZ.  HIs was perhaps the most promising of all the presentations, even if he seemed implausibly optimistic when he talked of the “once in a lifetime opportunity” to fix the New Zealand economy, end its “muddling along” performance, and (the government mantra again) deliver a more “sustainable, productive and inclusive economy”.  He didn’t point to a single sign that either the government or their Opposition were interested in anything serious along those lines.

But he did highlight the need to think carefully about policies that “fit us here” including taking explicit account of our remoteness. He called for a much deeper understanding of the problem, for a priority on good economic research, for the development of credible narratives that explain our underperformance and ground sold recommendations for policy changes. Much of this reflected Paul’s efforts at the Commission, including the narrative he drove (and wrote) –  which I wrote about here.   In some of his work, Paul has expressed sympathy for aspects of my story around immigration policy, and noted that he welcome the current Productivity Commission inquiry.

Some of his specifics I’m less convinced of, and he noted that his own views have a lot of overlap with the OECD’s Going for Growth proposals (see above for how limited they are) –  while noting that he had been involved in the very first Going for Growth, back in 2005 when he worked at the OECD, and the ideas mentioned for New Zealand then were much the same as those now.

Conway ended with a call for specifics, for work with policy people and lawyers, and for a lot more emphasis on communications and doing the “hard sell” to our “lawmakers”, claiming that as he had got older he was increasingly convinced that the task was mainly marketing good ideas –  “we know what needs to be done” – and building consensus, rather than devising new ideas.

And at that point I had to leave.  Perhaps the follow-up questions generated some startling insights, but probably not (and I have no idea how many New Zealand focused people were even in attendance).  My biggest criticism is for the OECD –  which, after all, put the event on and their ideas on the table –  who seem simply inadequate for the task pf offering serious, analytically and historically grounded, advice to New Zealand authorities (or others here who might want to champion actually doing something about decades of failure) on making a dramatic difference to economywide productivity outcomes here.  It must be more than a decade now since I attended a workship in Paris where OECD staff presented modelling suggesting that on their standard prescriptions New Zealand should be much much richer and more productive, which suggested that there was something quite seriously wrong with their model, at least as applied to (really remote) New Zealand (I’ve long held the view that –  unsurprisingly – the OECD has model and mentality that probably primarily adds value in small European countries (a lot of those in the OECD).   One might argue that it doesn’t matter, since no politician here is serious about change (at least for the better, the current government is pursuing paths likely to worsen things) but that isn’t really the point of the exercise.   As various speakers noted yesterday socialising ideas, persuading people, showing what might be possible are all a significant part of a prelude to action (just possibly one day).   I disagree with Paul Conway that there is consensus about what needs to be done: there clearly isn’t, and may never be, but we might expect an entity with the resources and expertise of the OECD to be offering a lot more insight, a lot more recommendations commensurate with the scale of the failure, than we are actually getting.

As for the New Zealand Productivity Commission, they seem to be on a downhill path, more interested in cutting pies differently than growing them, too confident in politicians and officials, and more inclined to wishful thinking than serious analysis indicating what might really lift our productivity levels back towards the top tiers of the OECD.    I guess there is cause and effect at work, but it is no wonder politicians aren’t serious about change when the advice they get from high-powered official and international agencies is so thin.  It is a lot easier to just cut the pie differently and dream up more announceables, but reversing the relative productivity decline is really what matters for our future material wellbeing –  those at the top and those at the bottom –  ours, our children, our grandchildren.  If we don’t fix it, exit will remain an increasingly attractive option for many.

Making sense of the national accounts

Michael Reddell pandemic, Productivity

Doing so is more than usually challenging right now. We had the huge disruption of the draconian national lockdown last year, and some more limited sets of restrictions since then. Some of the economic aspects of that were impossible to measure accurately, although no doubt in many areas SNZ will continue to try valiantly to refine their estimates. Largely-closed borders continue and thanks to the ill-judged decision of politicians and bureaucrats to scrap departure cards a few years ago we are now flying quite blind around recent net migration estimates (SNZ use a model, but – like any model – their model struggles to cope with a dramatic regime shift). Some of the difficulties are amplified by New Zealand’s long-term underinvestment in good economic statistics – a choice of successive governments, sometimes aided and abetted by SNZ management.

New Zealand has two measures of quarterly GDP. The expenditure and production-based approaches are both trying to estimate the same thing (as will the forthcoming income measure) but data collection challenges mean that it isn’t for several years that the two series are more or less reconciled (and even then not always that well).

GDP long term

But if the two series are, eventually, more or less reconciled that isn’t much consolation now.

Here is the more recent period, this time per capita and indexed to 100 in 2016q3, the last date for which the current estimates of the two approaches are almost identical.

nz per capita

Over 4.5 years a gap of 3.7 per cent has opened up between the two series. And there is no good ex ante reason to prefer one estimate over the other.

In per capita terms – using the current SNZ official population estimate – that is the difference between 2.4 per cent and 6.2 per cent growth in real per capita GDP over the period shown. One of those numbers is not too bad, the other is pretty dire. For the Covid period – so since the last pre-Covid quarter in 2019q4 – it is the difference between a 0.9 per cent fall in real per capita GDP and a 0.7 per cent increase. I usually simply average the two approaches, so a best stab in the dark is probably that we are back to around pre-Covid levels, but really who knows.

And it is complicated by the fact that the population estimates themselves are a moveable feast. SNZ’s official estimate – using their 12/16 model-based rule. They estimate that the resident population has increased by 6500 over the year to March on account of immigration. But one of the few hard numbers we know is the number of people coming and going from New Zealand (in total, for whatever reason) and those numbers show a net outflow of 56446 people between 1 April 2020 and 31 March 2021. It is at least possible that as the 12/16 estimate converges to hard numbers (SNZ know with confidence what happened 16 months later) that we end up with a rather low contribution from net migration in the last 12 months or so?

A revision along those lines might sound like a good thing – if the resident population was smaller then given GDP average per capita real GDP was higher. But I doubt it is as simple as that because many of the components of the GDP estimates themselves will have been estimated, from sample surveys, that have behind them a view on the population. Revise down the population and it is likely that the subsequently-reported GDP estimates will also be a bit lower.

One of my favourite charts over the years has been on real GDP per hour worked. My normal approach is to use the two GDP estimate and the two estimates of hours (QES and HLFS), index all the series and simply use the average that results. Here is the chart for the last 10 years

real GDP phw June 21

The decade was mostly pretty bad, but who knows what has gone on in the last 12 months. Some of the apparent noise reflects differences in the two hours series: the HLFS estimates hours worked and the QES hours paid. Usually they are much the same thing, but not in the midst of a lockdown with a wage subsidy. But that was mostly a problem for the June and September quarters last year.

No one is going seriously argue that Covid has been good for productivity, so even if the latest estimate looks quite appealing it is unlikely to endure. Now, of course, you’ll recall the divergence in the two GDP measures, so I could show you are a chart with really big differences in the productivity estimates depending which GDP measure one uses.

Perhaps you think that the lift in productivity shown in the chart is mostly a compositional effect. When hours worked dropped it is often the lowest paid, lowest productivity hours that drop off first. But even there our two surveys report quite different things: QES hours in March were (seasonally adjusted) 1.8 per cent lower than they had been in December 2019, but HLFS hours were 1.4 per cent higher. There is, inevitably, noise in these series, but it does leave analysts somewhat at sea at present. And not even sure where the errors, and future revisions, might be. I’m pretty confident that labour productivity has not really increased by 2 per cent in the last 15-18 months, but what that means for the component estimates I don’t know.

I’ve sometimes shown comparison with Australia, especially for real GDP per hour worked.

Aus GDP 2

There is much, much less volatility than in the New Zealand estimates. Of course, it also seems unlikely that underlying productivity per (stratified) worker has stepped up through Covid, but…..hours worked in Australia are estimated to have been 3.4 per cent lower in the March quarter than in the December 2019 quarter, so there is a a somewhat plausible composition story there. In fact this is what happened in Australia in the 2008/09 recession.

aus 08

And as the labour market recovered, productivity fell back to trend.

Some of the measurement challenges are unavoidable, but it does look as if the (highly regarded) ABS is making a better fist of things than SNZ.

We can be confident that the economy is in much better heart than it was last June, but – per official statistics anyway – that really is about all. Fortunately, we have business opinion surveys because perhaps more than usually we really rest on them for anything much of a sense of where the economy is right now. And for some things that matter longer-term, notably productivity, we really are just flying blind at present, backed perhaps by basic theory that whatever good shutting borders has done for public health (a real gain) it is almost certainly at least somewhat bad for productivity.

Productivity growth: failures and successes

Michael Reddell New Zealand economic performance, Productivity

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 to think of a single thing they’ve done to improve the climate for market-driven business investment and productivity growth, and easy to identify a growing list of things that worsen the outlook – most individually probably quite small effects, but the cumulative direction is pretty clear. Before I had kids I used to idly talk about not encouraging any I had to stay in New Zealand, so relatively poor were the prospects becoming. It is harder to take that stance when it is real young people one enjoys being around, but…..at least from an economic perspective New Zealand looks like an ever-worse option, increasingly an inward-looking backwater.

One of the ways of seeing the utter failure – the indifference, the betrayal of New Zealanders – is to look at the growing list of countries that are either moving past us, or fast approaching us. Recall that for 50 years or more New Zealand was among the handful of very highest income countries on earth.

For doing those comparisons I prefer to focus on measures of real GDP per hour worked, compared using purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates. It is, broadly speaking, a measure of how much value is being added by firms – mostly in the private sector – for each unit of labour those firms are deploying. Real GDP per capita can be useful for some purposes – actual material living standards comparisons – but can be greatly, directly, affected, by demographics, in ways that don’t reveal much about the performance of the economy and the environment for business investment.

When I run charts here about productivity comparisons across countries I mostly use OECD data. Most – but not quite all – of what we think of as advanced economies are in the OECD (as well as a few new entrants that aren’t very advanced at all, and seem like “diversity hires”, incidentally making New Zealand look a bit less bad in “whole of OECD” comparisons). But once in a while I check out the Conference Board’s Total Economy Database, which has a smaller range of series for a rather wider range of countries, advanced and emerging. The latest update was out a few weeks ago.

As regular readers know I have highlighted from time to time the eastern and central European OECD countries – all Communist-run until about 1989 – that were catching or moving past us. I first noticed this when I helped write the 2025 Taskforce’s report – remember, the idea that we might close the gaps to Australia by 2025, when in fact policy indifference has meant they’ve kept widening – in 2009, so that must have been data for 2007 or 2008. Back then only Slovenia had matched us, and they were (a) small and (b) just over the border from Italy and Austria. The OECD and Conference Board numbers are slightly different, but by now probably four of the eight have matched or exceeded us (and all eight managed faster productivity growth than us over the last cycle). Turkey – also in the OECD – has also now passed us.

But what about the central and eastern European countries that aren’t in the OECD? As I glanced down the tables I remembered a post I’d written four years ago about Romania and comparisons with New Zealand’s economic performance. Romania had been achieving quite strong productivity growth prompting me to note

….one of the once-richest countries of the world is on course for having Romania, almost a byword in instability, repression etc for so many decades, catch us up.  It would take a while if current trends continue.  But not that long. Simply extrapolating the relative performance of just the last decade (and they had a very nasty recession in 2008/09 during that time) about another 20 years.

So how have things been going?

romania 21

Even if we focus just on the last hard pre-Covid estimate (for 2019) they were up to about 84 per cent of average New Zealand labour productivity. If these trends continue, they’d catch us by about the end of the decade.

To be clear, it is generally a good thing when other countries succeed. It is great that these central and eastern European countries moved out from the shadow of the USSR and non-market economies and are now achieving substantial lifts in living standards. The point of the comparisons is not to begrudge their successes – which have a long way still to run to match most of western Europe – but to highlight the failure New Zealand governments have presided over. We were richer than all these countries for almost all of modern New Zealand history, and soon our economy will be less productive than all or most of them. We were also richer and better off than most or all of today’s most productive advanced economies, and now we just trail in the their wake. Even as the most productive advanced economies have experienced a marked slowing in their productivity growth in the last 15 years or so

prod growth advanced

we’ve really only managed little more than to track their slowdown – and recall that the median of these countries has average labour productivity two-thirds higher than New Zealand’s so – as in the central and eastern European countries – there were big gaps that might have been closed somewhat. Most of those countries did so, but not New Zealand.

To revert to Romania for a moment, it is not as if it is without its challenges. It ranks about 55th on the World Bank’s ease of doing business index, and has been slipping down that ranking (although still doing very well on a couple of components). Corruption seems to be a major problem. The neighbours aren’t the best either – including Ukraine and Moldova. Reading the latest IMF report (pre-Covid) there were signs of some looming macro imbalances but the latest IMF forecasts suggests a pretty optimistic outlook still, including investment as a share of GDP climbing back to about 25 per cent of GDP. Perhaps something is going to derail that productivity convergence (with New Zealand) story but it isn’t there in the forecasts at present. And if corruption has to be a drag of some sort (but how large can that effect be?) government spending and revenue are both smaller as a share of GDP than in New Zealand.

In GDP per capita terms the picture (Romania vs New Zealand) is not quite as grim. That mostly reflects differences in hours worked

Romania hrs

Some of that is demographics, some not. Either way, hours worked are an input – a cost – not (mostly) a good thing in their own right. New Zealand struggles to maintain upper middle income living standards for the population as a whole by working a lot more hours (per capita) than many other advanced countries.

And then of course there is the difference that must be quite uncomfortable for the political and bureaucratic champions of “big New Zealand” – those politicians (both sides) just champing at the bit to get our population growing rapidly again.

romania popn

Romania is a pretty big country. When this chart started it had almost six times our population. 25 years on Romania’s population is a bit under four times ours. I mentioned earlier the investment share of GDP: Romania’s is averaging a little higher than ours, even with these massive population growth (shrinkage) differences, so just imagine how much more of those investment resources are going to deepen capital per worker (even public infrastructure per citizen). (For those interested the total fertility rates of the two countries are now very similar: the differences in trend population growth are largely down to immigration/emigration.)

Now, of course, I haven’t mentioned being in the EU or being located not too far from many of the most productive economies on earth (although Bucharest to Zurich isn’t much less than the distance Wellington to Sydney). Those are advantages. Of course they are. But then why do New Zealand officials and policymakers continue to champion a (now) purely policy-driven “big New Zealand” when (a) almost nothing has gone right for that story in (at least) the last 25 years, and (b) when so much else of policy choices only reduces the likelihood of the future under such a strategy being any better?

Romania really is a success story, and I’d like to understand a bit better why (for example) it has been doing so much better than Bulgaria and Serbia. But it isn’t an isolated success story: in addition to the OECD eastern and central European economies, Croatia isn’t doing too badly either.

But – and taking a much longer span – this chart still surprised me. It draws on different database – the Maddison Project collection of historical real GDP per capita data. Since it is per capita data it includes all those differences in hours worked per capita (data which simply isn’t available for most countries in the distant past). I’ve started in 1875 simply because that is when the Romania data start. I’ve shown only the countries for which there is 1875 data (the last observations are 2016 simply because that is when this particular database stops), with the exception of China and India which I’ve added in for illustrative purposes because there are a couple of estimates for years between 1870 and 1887 which I’ve simply interpolated. The chart shows the ratio of real per capita incomes in 2016 as a ratio of those in 1875.

romania maddison

Best of them all. New Zealand not so much (and yes we were about the top of the class in 1875, but the New Zealand story is submergence not convergence, given how many of these countries are now richer than us).

To be clear, over the last 140+ years New Zealand has been a far better – safer, more prosperous, fairer, more open – country in which to live than Romania. Whether it will still be so for most the next century is increasingly a very open question. Our politicians seem unconcerned, and if any of them have private concerns they do nothing about them – no serious policies in government, so no serious policy reform options in Opposition. Nothing. They seem to just prefer nothing more than the occasional ritual mention.

Still on matters productivity, I finished reading last night an excellent new book on productivity: Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy is a Sign of Success by Dietrich Vollrath, a professor of economics at the University of Houston. It is incredibly clearly written, and is a superb introduction to economic growth and productivity for anyone interested (I”ll be commending it to my son who has just started university economics). I’m not really persuaded by his story about the US, but it is well worth reading if you want to think about these issues as they apply to one of the highest productivity economies on earth. It suffers (as so many US books) do from being exclusively US-focused, even though there is a range of northern European economies with productivity levels very similar to (a bit above, a bit below) those in the US and one might think that their data, their experiences, might be a cross-check on some of his stories. To be clear, his focus is on a frontier economy, not ones – whether New Zealand or the central and east European ones, or even the UK and Australia – which start so far inside the frontier. But it is a very good introduction to how to think about sum of the issues, and a summary of many of the papers that the research-rich US economy generates.

No idea apparently, probably not much interest

Michael Reddell Productivity, Productivity Commission

Over the three and half years that Jacinda Ardern has been Prime Minister and Grant Robertson Minister of Finance it has become increasingly obvious that not only do they have no serious ideas for turning around decades of productivity growth underperformance, and no intention of doing much on that score, but they have no real interest either.

Appointments are among the things that help reveal priorities. A couple of years ago they had the opportunity to look for a new Secretary to the Treasury who might revitalise the agency and start generating serious credible advice on fixing that economic failure – with all its ramifications for opportunities in other areas of life. They chose to pass up that opportunity.

More recently – and the focus of this post – there has been the Productivity Commission, set up a decade ago with some vision that it might offer medium-term analysis, research, and advice focused on reversing that economic failure. It hasn’t done a great job at that over the years, partly because the Commission is heavily constrained to work on specific inquiry topics that the government of the day determines. Neither government has really been interested in tackling the decades-long failure.

Late last year the government had the chance to appoint a new chair of the Commission – the key position in this (small) organisation. They could have found someone serious: someone with wide credibility on these issues, and preferably not seen as a partisan figure. As it was, they appointed Ganesh Nana. I wrote a bit about the appointment at the time.

Nana took office on 1 February. There was always the hope that reality wouldn’t be as bad as I (and others) had feared. Unfortunately, this week we’ve had two public contributions from Nana – an introductory statement, and a first on-the-record speech – that suggest reality is at least as bad as feared.

Take first his introductory statement, posted on the Commission’s website the other day. I described it elsewhere as just another marker in the sad decline of the Productivity Commission. In 1000 words there was not one hint of any insight on New Zealand’s productivity challenges just – in the style of the modern public sector – lots of Maori words, together with straw men (as if any government – or person – ever has cared only about GDP). It wasn’t much more than, as one other observer put it, a “word salad”. Perhaps it warmed the hearts of parts of the Labour Party and places further left, but it was almost entirely substance-free. He just doesn’t seem that interested in the medium-term performance of the economy – for which productivity is a key marker.

Perhaps more disconcerting was his speech yesterday at a Waikato University event called the 2021 New Zealand Economics Forum (which continues this morning), an event focused on the longer-term economic challenges New Zealand faces, especially in the wake of Covid. The organisers seem to have attracted a reasonably impressive array of speakers. After a welcome and introduction from the Waikato Vice-Chancellor, Nana – newly inducted head of the Productivity Commission – was the first speaker. It would seem like a forum and topic tailor-made for a powerful and insightful speech from the Chairman.

You can watch the whole thing yourself – about 45 minutes into the recording of yesterday’s event here. It was quite remarkable for how little there was there (and in fact how low-energy it all was). His title was “Challenges and opportunities for inproving productivity in a post-Covid world” but I heard not a single serious idea and hardly any supporting analysis. He did acknowledge that New Zealand’s productivity performance for the last two decades “and probably longer” (as if there is any serious doubt on the matter) had been “sobering”, and that productivity growth had been slowing. But that was about it. And if one of his messages was intended to be “you can’t keep on doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results” well, I’d agree. But that was really it. And when he suggested -in the body of his talk – that perhaps tourism shouldn’t come back to the way it was pre-Covid, it was supported by precisely no analysis at all, nor any suggestion as to where – if his idle prognostication or wish came true – the earnings and employment that tourism has generated might be replaced from. Perhaps someone might ask the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Tourism, or the PM what they think of their new Chairman’s perspective.

To be clear, I do not regard international tourism as the sort of industry likely to lead us back to first world economywide productivity performance – there is no country I’m aware of that it plays such a role – but them I’m not the only idly, but publicly, as head of a significant government agency, suggesting that the industry might usefully shrink. There seemed to be no mental model behind the comments, no research, and no policy prescriptions. And, of course, no cross-country comparative analysis or perspectives, and no sense of how far behind the productivity leaders we now are. It was as if he really wasn’t that interested.

There was quite a bit – none insightful – about the “Four capitals” Treasury likes to go on about. And just to reinforce the doubts that Nana has little or nothing useful to say about productivity, and not even much interest, in the question time we got a comment about how while the Commission would continue to publish its annual statistical report on productivity, he didn’t really like to pay too much attention to productivity. There was a fair point – but one that no one disputes – that productivity is really a medium-term thing and that he doesn’t pay much attention to a couple of quarters (to which I’d add, among other things data revisions reinforce that point). He described it as akin to a “profit and loss” measure, while he preferred to look at the “balance sheet” – those four capitals again, which might perhaps sound good to some but (a) for economic assets, the value is in the returns they generate (or credibly could generate, but (b) by comparison with labour productivity for which there is a good time series data, and reasonable cross-country comparisons, most of the “lets value the capitals” approaches offer neither. If, of course, there is a well-understood, long accepted, point that simply raping and pillaging the environment is, all else equal, a less valuable form of economic growth than income that does not do so, it doesn’t help in the slightest address the issues of New Zealand’s economic failure.

But perhaps that is the point. Robertson and Ardern have no interest in doing so – simply in cutting a small pie a bit differently – and so why bother appointing a chair of the Productivity Commission who might lead some hard thinking on the issues and offer options that might improve productivity – and wider “wellbeing” that stems from productivity possibilities. Easier simply to handwave and feel good.

Shame about the prospects for our country.

Productivity, Productivity Commission, and all that

Michael Reddell New Zealand economic performance, pandemic, Productivity, Productivity Commission

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 New Zealand and across the Tasman the Australian Productivity Commission had become a fairly highly-regarded institution. But even from the early days I recall suggesting that it was hard to be too optimistic about the long-term prospects of the Commission, noting (among other things) the passing into history of the early Monetary and Economic Council, which had in its day (60s and early 70s) produced some worthwhile reports. In a small, no longer rich, country, maintaining critical mass was also always going to be a challenge, and agencies like The Treasury might be expected to have their beady eye on any budgetary resources allocated to the Commission, and on any good staff the Commission might attract or develop (a shift to another office block at bit further along The Terrace was unlikely to be much of a hurdle).

What I probably didn’t put enough weight on in those early days was the point that if governments weren’t at all interested in doing anything serious about New Zealand’s decades-long productivity failure, there really wasn’t much substantive point to a Productivity Commission at all, unless perhaps as something to distract the sceptics with (“see, we have a Productivity Commission”).

Ten years on, it isn’t obvious what the Commission has accomplished. There have been a few interesting research papers, some reports that may have clarified the understanding of a few policy points. But what difference have they made? Little, at least that I can see. Is the housing market disaster being substantively addressed? Is the state sector better managed? Is economywide productivity back on some sort of convergence path? Not as far as I can tell. Mostly that isn’t the Commission’s fault, although my impression is that the quality of the reports has deteriorated somewhat in recent years. But if politicians don’t care about fixing what ails this economy, why keep the Commission? It might be no more pointless than quite a few other government agencies and even ministries, but they all cost scarce real resources.

For the last 18 months I’ve been looking to appointment of the new chair of the Commission, replacing Murray Sherwin who has had the job for 10 years, as perhaps one last pointer to the seriousness – or otherwise – of Labour about productivity issues. There wasn’t much sign the Minister of Finance or Prime Minister cared much at all – or perhaps even understood the scale of our failure – but just possibly they might choose to appoint a new chair of the Productivity Commission who might lead really in-depth renewed intellectual efforts to address the failure, perhaps even in ways that might, by the force of their analysis and presentation, make it increasingly awkward for governments (Labour or National) to simply keep doing nothing. I wasn’t optimistic, partly because I’d watched Robertson and Ardern do nothing for several years, but also because – to be frank – it really wasn’t clear where they might find such an exceptional candidate even had they wanted one.

But then they removed all doubt last week when they announced the appointment of Ganesh Nana as the new chair. There is a strong sense that he is too close to the Labour Party. If that wasn’t ideal, it might not bother me much – especially given the thin pickings to choose a chair from among – if it were matched with a high and widespread regard among the economics and policy community for his rigour and intellectual leadership, including on productivity issues. Or even perhaps if he knew government and governent processes inside out (Sherwin, after all, was a senior public servant rather than himself being an intellectual leader). I don’t suppose the Nana commission is simply likely to parrot lines the Beehive would prefer – and can imagine some of Nana’s preferences being uncomfortable for them from the left – but this is someone who has spent 20+ years in the public economics debate in New Zealand, from his perch at BERL, and yet as far as I can tell his main two views of potential relevance are that (a) inflation targeting (of the sort adopted in most advanced economies) is a significant source of New Zealand’s economic underperformance, and (b) that a much larger population might make a big difference (notwithstanding use of that strategy for, just on this wave, the last 25 years or so.

Then there was this bumpf from the Minister’s press statement announcing the appointment

Ganesh Nana said he is excited to take up the position and looks forward to working with other Commission members and staff to focus on a broad perspective on productivity.

“Contributing to a transformation of the economic model and narrative towards one that values people and prioritises our role as kaitiaki o taonga is my kaupapa.  This perspective sees the delivery of wellbeing across several dimensions as critical measures of success of any economic model.

“Stepping into the Productivity Commission after more than 20 years at BERL will be a wrench for me and a move to outside my comfort zone.  However, this opportunity was not one I could ignore as the challenges facing 21st century Aotearoa become ever more intense.

“The role and nature of the work of the Commission is set to change in light of these pressing challenges.  I am committed to ensure the Commission will increasingly contribute to the wider strategic and policy kōrero,” Dr Nana said.

Whatever that means – and quite a bit isn’t at all clear to me – it doesn’t suggest any sort of laser-like focus on lifting, for example, economywide GDP per hour worked, in ways that might lift material living standards for New Zealanders as a whole.

(And then there was the unfortunate disclosure in the final part of the Minister’s press statement that the government has agreed that while functioning as a senior economic official, paid by the taxpayer, Nana is to be allowed to retain his almost half-share in his active economic consulting firm BERL. There is the small consolation that the Commission itself will not contract any business with BERL, but that should not be sufficient to reassure anyone concerned about what is left of the substance or appearance of good governance in New Zealand.)

A couple of weeks ago the Productivity Commission released a draft report on its “Frontier Firms” inquiry. The Commission does not control the inquiries it does – they are chosen by the government – and this one also seemed a bit daft to say the least, since “frontier firms” always seem much likely to arise from an overall economic policy environment that has been got right, rather than being something policymakers should be focusing on directly. But the Commission might still have made something useful, trying to craft something a bit more akin to a silk purse from the sow’s ear of a terms of reference.

I had thought of devoting a whole post to the draft report, and perhaps even making a formal submission on it, but since the report will be finalised under the Nana commission that mostly seems as though it would be a waste of time. And there is the odd useful point in the report, including the reminder that our productivity growth performance has remained dreadful by the standards of other modestly-productive advanced economies, and that we have relied on more hours worked, and the good fortune of the terms of trade, to avoid overall material living standards slipping much recently relative to other advanced economies. Productivity growth – much faster than we’ve achieved – remains central to any chance of sustainably lifting those material living standards and opening up other lifestyle etc choices.

But mostly the report is a bit of a dog’s breakfast. Just before the draft report was released the Commission released a short paper on immigration issues that they had commissioned. I wrote about that note, somewhat sceptically, at the time – sceptical even though the gist of the author’s case might not be thought totally out of line with some of my own ideas. It turned out that the Fry and Wilson work was the basis for the Commission’s own discussion of immigration in the draft report, a discussion that neither seems terribly robust nor at all well-connected to the “frontier firms” theme of the report. Perhaps the RSE scheme has problems, perhaps some low-skilled work visas are issued too readily, but…..apple orchards and vineyards didn’t really seem to be the sort of “frontier firms” the Commission had in mind in the rest of the report.

Perhaps my bigger concern was about their attempts to draw lessons from other countries. They, reasonably enough, suggest that there might be lessons from other small open advanced economies, perhaps especially relatively remote ones. But then they seem to end up mostly interested in places like Sweden, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands – all of which are in common economic area that is the EU (two even with the euro currency, most with no disadvantages of remoteness). I don’t think there was a single reference to Iceland, Malta, or Cyprus. Or to Israel – that country with all the high-tech firms and a productivity performance almost as bad as ours. And – though it might not be small, it has many similar characteristics to New Zealand – no mention at all of Australia. Remote Chile, Argentina and Uruguay get no mention – even though two of those three have had strong productivity growth in recent times – and neither, perhaps more surprisingly, do any of the (mostly small) OECD/EU countries in central and eastern Europe, many of which are now passing New Zealand levels of average labour productivity.

There wasn’t any systematic cross-country economic historical analysis or a rigorous attempt to assess which examples might hold what lessons for New Zealand. Instead, there a mix of things that might be music to the ears of a government that wants to be more active, and perhaps to punt our money again on the emergence of some mega NZ excellent firm(s) – without any demonstrated evidence that it (or its officials) can do so wisely or usefully – plus the odd thing that must have appealed to someone (eg the material on immigration – a subject that might still usefully warrant a full inquiry of its own, if the government would allow it, and when better than when we are in any case in something of a hiatus).

This will probably be the last post for this year, so I thought I’d leave you with a couple of charts to ponder.

The first is a reminder of just how little we know about what is going on with productivity – or probably most other aggregate economic measures – right now. As regular readers will know, I have updated every so often an economywide measure of labour productivity growth that averages the two different real GDP series (production and expenditure) and indexes of the two measures of hours (HLFS hours worked, QES hours paid).

mix of econ data

First, there is the huge difference in the two GDP measures. Whichever one one uses – but especially the expenditure measure – suggests a reasonable lift in average labour productivity this year (on one combination as much as 5 per cent). In the period to June there was an argument about low productivity workers losing their jobs, averaging up productivity for the remainder, but how plausible is that when hours are now estimated to be down only 1% or so on where they were at the end of last year (much less than, say, the fall in the last recession)? And thus how plausible is the notion of an acceleration in productivity growth given all the roadblocks the virus, and responses to it, have put in place this year. And although SNZ’s official population estimates have the population up 1.5 per cent this year (to September), if we take the natural increase data and the total net arrivals across the border data, they suggest a very slight drop this year in the number of people actually in New Zealand. I’m not sure, then, which of the economic data we can have any confidence in, although I’ll take a punt that the single least plausible of these numbers is the expenditure GDP one, and any resulting implication of any sort of real lift in productivity this year. SNZ has an unenviable job trying to get this year’s data straight.

But, of course, the real productivity challenge for New Zealand was there before Covid was heard of, and most likely be there still when Covid is but a memory. As we all know, New Zealand languishes miles behind the OECD productivity leaders (a bunch of northern European countries and the US), but in this chart I’ve shown how we’ve done over the full economic cycle from 2007 to 2019 relative not to the OECD leaders but to the countries that in 2007 either had low labour productivity than we did, or were not more than 10 per cent ahead of us then. For New Zealand I’ve shown both the number in the OECD database, and my average measure (which has the advantage of being updated for last week’s GDP release).

productivity 07 to 19

Whichever of the two NZ measures one uses, we’ve done better only than Greece and Mexico. Over decades Mexico has done so badly that the OECD suggests labour productivity in 2019 was less than 5 per cent higher than it had been in 1990. Even Greece has done less badly than that.

(As a quick cross-check, I also looked at the growth rates for this group of countries for this century to date. We’ve still done third-worst, beating the same two countries, over that period.)

It is a dismal performance. And there isn’t slightest sign that our government cares, or is at all interested in getting to the bottom of the problem, let alone reversing the decades of failure. Talking blithely about alternative measures of wellbeing etc shouldn’t be allowed to disguise that failure, which blights the living standards of this generation and the prospects of the next.

(And, sadly, there is no sign any political opposition party is really any better.)

Coda

Michael Reddell New Zealand economic performance, Productivity

And so we now have a single political party in a position to form a majority government. Between our single-chamber Parliament and the historically very tight party discipline on Labour MPs, the new government will be able to do whatever they like over the next three years. And where significant things are not done, it will be entirely down to them: their choice.

Of course, they didn’t promise much, so most don’t seem to expect much. But the issues, challenges, and problems don’t go away just a party or government chooses to ignore them. House prices for example – where the Prime Minister has consistently refused to suggest she might act in ways designed to markedly lower the price of urban land/houses.

Or, and the economic issue that mostly drove the creation of this blog, New Zealand’s dismal long-term economic performance. In short, productivity growth (and the lack of it), and our continued decline relative to other advanced economies.

The outlook wasn’t good before Covid – the last government was doing nothing, and Labour was promising nothing, that would have prevented those well-established and dismal trends continuing. But now there is Covid to confront too.

One view of the outlook was contained in the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook forecasts published last week. The IMF doesn’t have a particularly good track record as a forecaster, but its forecasts do have two particular values at present: first, they are compiled consistently for a wide range of countries, and second, they forecast/project five years ahead, which on most readings is currently far enough out that one could think of things by then being back to some sort of new normal. For what it is worth, the IMF also has no particular partisan interest in New Zealand, but has also, over the years, tended to run relatively upbeat stories about New Zealand when it does comment.

Unfortunately, the IMF does not publish productivity (eg real GDP per hour worked, or MFP) forecasts. But here is a chart showing their forecasts for growth in real GDP per capita for their “advanced country” grouping over the period from 2019 (pre Covid) to 2025).

IMF WEO 0ct 20

Third worst of all the advanced countries over this period, at least on the IMF’s telling. And do note that the countries a few to either side of us all have materially higher levels of labour productivity than New Zealand does, while the countries to the far left of the chart – best-performers – are mostly the countries (I’ve previously highlighted here) that started way behind and are now matching, and move to roar ahead of, New Zealand. On these projections, our relative decline – underway now for 70 years – keeps on keeping on.

Are there any silver linings? I couldn’t find any when I dug a bit deeper:

  • as I noted, since these numbers are for 2019 to 2025 they shouldn’t be affected by either measurement challenges, or real differences in economic structure, that contribute to quite different GDP outcomes for some quarters this year,
  • the difference also can’t be down to differences in how quickly unemployment drops back to normal (itself a thing amenable to policy, especially in a country with its own exchange rate): in most countries by 2025 the IMF thinks that unemployment rates will have got back to pretty close to 2019 levels (NZ’s is about 5 per cent, so not quite there, but it won’t explain anything like the differences in the real GDP chart).  For what they are worth, the IMF also publishes output gap estimates for G7 countries, and they are also back near zero by 2025. 
  • I didn’t look deeply into what border assumptions the IMF is making, but I did check their population growth projections, and they continue to forecast high rates of population growth over 2019 to 2025 (hardly lower than the rate for the previous six years, and third fastest in this group of countries), which again suggests they must think something like a new-normal re-establishes before too long.
  • the IMF seems to think that investment as a share of GDP will also be more or less back to pre-Covid rates by 2025 (unfortunately in New Zealand business investment in the last decade was very subdued, especially once one took account of the needs of a rapidly-rising population).

Sadly, the only realistic interpretation one can take is that the IMF thinks that over 2019 to 2025, on current government policies, New Zealand’s productivity growth performance –  labour productivity and MFP – will be simply shocking.  Most probably negative –  the only way to square falls in real GDP per capita, unemployment returning towards normal, and a reasonable level of investment – and almost certainly far worse than in almost all other advanced economies, and especially far worse than the performance in the countries that were aiming to close gaps with the OECD leaders.

It is a really dismal outlook.

Of course, it is only one set of forecasts.  The IMF may be completely wrong, even specifically about New Zealand’s relative performance.  But it isn’t clear what about policy or the economic environment should be expected to generate decent productivity growth over 2019 to 2025, especially after the fairly dismal performance in the pre-Covid years.

One would like to suppose it was the sort of issue the Minister of Finance would be intensely focused on.  One would like to think that The Treasury’s post-election briefing would have extensive analysis on the issue and possible remedies, and indeed how political party promises may even worsen the outlook.  But such is the malaise around New Zealand economic policy and performance that it seems unlikely.

Changing tack, for some months I’ve been writing much less here than I’d really intended or hoped to. I’ve made occasional references to my indifferent health. I’ve had bugs occasionally in the past that have hung around for a couple of months, never amenable to medical diagnosis, and then eventually gone away and I kept expecting this would be the same. But despite some moderately good weeks at times – this week wasn’t one of them – it hasn’t, and my doctor now reckons that I have some – perhaps fairly moderate – version of chronic fatigue syndrome. And while it still seems most likely that it will eventually go away again, there is no immediate timeframe for that. It seems a rather pathetic thing to have, but I can’t really ignore, say, the three daytime naps I needed on Tuesday.

As a result, I’ve decided for the time being to stop attempting to maintain any sort of regular blog output. As I’ve said to various people who’ve asked, I’m probably only able to operate at 50 or 60 per cent of normal, and while I’m fortunate in not having to try to hold down a fulltime job, I have other fixed commitments (household and other) that demand almost all that energy. Since there are good days, and even a few relatively good weeks, and there many issues (even if I don’t have the concentration to dig into all of them as I’d like), I expect I will probably post here from time to time. But I won’t be trying to meet any schedule. For anyone who wants to not miss out on those posts, feel free to subscribe to get posts by email, and I also use Twitter (@MHReddell) to, among other things, provide links to any posts here.

And now it is time for a lie down…..