Australia’s Strong Productivity Growth: Will it be Sustained?
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چکیده
Good morning. When CEDA approached me about speaking today, I was asked to concentrate on longer-term developments that will have a bearing on Australia’s future economic performance. Such an offer seemed hard to refuse, and so I looked around for a topic on which I could hopefully say something of interest. Given the impressive productivity growth that has been experienced over the past decade, I thought it would be useful to address the question: will this strong productivity performance be sustained? At the outset I should point out that, in addressing this question, I am interested in prospective productivity developments over, say, the next decade rather than the next year or so. Furthermore, I am going to concentrate on productivity rather than economic growth. That is, I will not have anything to say about the demographic transition that is currently underway which will reduce labour force growth over coming decades and thereby reduce the trend rate of economic growth for any given rate of productivity growth. Before delving into the details, let me remind you what it is that productivity statistics seek to measure. The two most commonly discussed measures of productivity are labour and multifactor productivity. Labour productivity is a measure of the amount of output that can be produced for given labour input, that is, per hour of work. Multifactor productivity, on the other hand, measures the amount of output that can be produced keeping all inputs (usually capital and labour) in fixed supply. So growth in productivity is a measure of the extent to which more output can be produced with the same inputs.
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تاریخ انتشار 2001