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.
