Solving the productivity puzzle
Can Australia maintain its high standard of living in the face of declining productivity?
Glyn Davis
G'day I'm Glyn Davis and welcome to The Policy Shop, a place where we think about policy choices.
Male
What really drives the economy is the market system and it's the people like the Jeff [Bezoses] of the world and we haven't had good productivity gains lately but productivity per capita goes up, the country is wealthier; it's that simple. So productivity gains and innovation are the key.
Male 2
Sixty per cent of our national productivity comes from innovation so the biggest driver of better living standards in Australia is productivity and the biggest driver of productivity is innovation, so that's why it matters.
Male 3
The U.S. is 30 times richer than it was 200 years ago, but it's not because it's producing 30 times more of the stuff that it was producing 200 years ago, it's producing different kinds of goods that did not exist with different kinds of techniques that did not exist. So the process of growth has meant changing what you make and changing how you make it.
Female
Productivity really is not the exciting term, but it matters so much as a bedrock of living standards, opportunities and what we can promise our children in generations to come.
Glyn Davis
Today our focus is productivity, perhaps the most sought-after goal for the Australian economy, only surpassed perhaps by the relentless search for innovation. But what is productivity? Why is it important? Recent reports from the OECD and the Australian Treasury show an encouraging Australian picture when it comes to productivity, so do we have anything to worry about?
The Productivity Commission certainly thinks so, and it's announced that every five years it will produce a dedicated report to monitor the health of Australia's productivity and make policy suggestions a government should consider.
Peter Harris is the chairman of the Productivity Commission and he joins us on the line from Canberra to talk about this report and why solving the productivity puzzle is so important. Peter, welcome to The Policy Shop.
Peter Harris
Thanks, Glyn.
Glyn Davis
So we hear a lot about productivity but can you tell us exactly what it is?
Peter Harris
The very best [for me] is the most amusing, that productivity is a measure of what we don't know about the Australian economy. That is, magically when we put one more as it were unit of labour or one more unit of capital to work, we get 1.01 additional units of output, that is the stuff keeps getting better.
The important point of this being we don't quite know why. Now, we think we've got some handle on this but we don't quite know why and it's tremendously important should that little machine start slowing or choking, that we understand better why and we potentially attempt to fix it, and there is little doubt that the machine is choking and slowing. In fact, no real doubt at all.
Glyn Davis
Why does that matter Peter? Why is it important that productivity continues to increase?
Peter Harris
Because that additional unit, that additional .01 we get out of it, is a very substantial contributor to a national income, literally to the incomes that are shared out across Australia. That's not in the sense of saying it's a direct reward you get at work, it's just that the opportunity to be paid more comes from higher demands from better producing parts of the economy that enable you to shift to a job in there or for your children to get a job in there.
To sustainably, over decades, demonstrably across economies, not just ours but the world economy, productivity has been the primary driver of income growth. Therefore to the extent that we see income growth is how we give ourselves a better lifestyle, so that money which some people would say is not the be all and end all of human existence, but that money translates into opportunity and opportunity for a better lifestyle.
Glyn Davis
In a speech at the recent Melbourne Institute Economic and Social Outlook Conference you stated, and this is a quote, "a force that has been primarily responsible for lifting incomes and creating value to share amongst labour and capital for decade after decade since the early stages of the industrial revolution, appears to be in decay across the developed world".
So why is productivity declining across the world and how much do we share in this global trend?
Peter Harris
This is the big question, why? The answer is there's a deep uncertainty about why, but you would, notwithstanding uncertainty say that if something that has been so responsible for producing enhanced opportunity and income over such a sustained period, you know, a century or more, is choking and slowing and in some cases hitting zero or even negative rates, you would say we should be trying to do something about it.
The uncertainty factor, the we-aren't-quite-sure-why, says that there are going to be judgements to be made and criticisms to be endured about whether this measure versus that measure is the better measure.
But doing nothing in the face of this is going to condemn us to a slowly declining economic paradigm and the damage in a slowly declining economic paradigm is that everybody is going to compete harder and harder for a smaller share of a declining opportunity. That isn't just the campaign much loved by ideologues between labour and capital, it's even between individual parts of the economy at the labour level.
Glyn Davis
So this is central then to individual opportunity for prosperity.
Peter Harris
It is in an economic sense the be all and end all, you know, we spend so much time concentrating on, say, the federal budget or a state budget or things like that. Ultimately, this is the primary difference for me as a public policy person between microeconomics and macroeconomics, the federal budget document is just that, it's an accounting transaction for a part of the Australian economy.
But the substantial force that alters the Australian economy over the medium and long term is productivity. It deserves at least the same level of regular attention as a budget document would, primarily because the one is much larger than the other.
Glyn Davis
Peter, some commentators have suggested that the reason for a fall in productivity is because today's innovations do not compare in scale or impact with the breakthroughs of the '90s, let alone earlier waves of transformations that gave us urban sanitation and electricity and the telephone, television and so on.
They point to the long lead times for many of the more recent innovations to play out into the economy, noting for example that Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb in the 1870s and 1880s, but it took nearly a century before this was ubiquitous across American homes. Are we simply seeing a change in the pattern of innovation and that's what's playing into productivity?
Peter Harris
Yeah, well that's one of the very important questions that contribute to this overall response to why and the data that's been put together by the particularly US economists who have spent a long time analysing just that question that you outlined in fantastic detail, does tend to suggest that today's innovations are translating less readily into substantial improvements in productivity than yesterday's innovations.
That is indeed a significant part of the answer to the question why, it begs another question, well then why is that so? We see this transformation occurring in front of us in our daily lives, we all carry an exceptional powerful computer in our pocket now and it gives us additional, as it were, social benefits. But at the same time business seems to be investing heavily in the utilisation of similar products and yet it is not translating to a significant increase in productivity and therefore in opportunity to earn incomes and have our children have, as it were, a better life than we had.
So a conundrum is followed by another conundrum. There's a really good analysis of electric motors and how when electric motors were discovered they replaced steam engines in factories but they put the motors in exactly the same place as the steam engines. What that meant was you had these very large motors a long way located from actual production and you didn't get much of an efficiency gain. Only when factory managers retired and/or factories were entirely replaced, were electric motors placed closer to production and you gained an immense benefit from that in terms of not having to have this very large factory area of multiple floors and belts running up and down them and all that kind of thing to drive power.
That re-organisation is an important contributor and a possible partial answer to this question, why hasn't the kind of innovation that we are seeing in the early stages of a digital economy we're now engaged in, why haven't we seen that translate to productivity? It may simply be that although we're investing in buying these things, we're not necessarily applying them with a different organisational mindset.
Glyn Davis
Can I ask you the obvious follow-up question? If contemporary innovation is not producing the productivity gains we expected, what role for policy?
Peter Harris
That's the crucial question and this report that we have given the government which is an analysis the government has asked us now to conduct every five years into the big questions of productivity in the Australian economy and what can be done about them. This analysis drives us towards the idea of looking at the non-market economy, such as [unclear described] that is the provision of services where in the productivity statistics, inputs are equated with outputs, literally, and therefore there's no analytical capability to say exactly how productive these services are.
They're classic services and ones that tremendously important to us in our daily lives, health and education and infrastructure and the provision of services and urban environments, so many of these are controlled by governments. We provide the payment opportunities for this, we set the prices for them, we actually do the purchasing, we regulate the provision and yet inside an economy they're far more difficult to analyse from a productivity perspective. So we've tried to spend a bit more time on that than on what you might call a classic market economy.
It's not to say the classic market economy is unimportant, we've sort of said it's in its own adjustment phase, but the role of government in being able "to do something" about the early digitisation of an economy is reasonably limited. It's limited in a positive way, that is, don't go into denial and don't impede things but instead perhaps smooth and help with adjustment, but in a direct provision of services kind of analysis for the Australian economy, the services where governments themselves are the primary transactors on our behalf, these are not subject to substantial analytical testing and policy development, then in our thesis they should be.
Glyn Davis
So I'm very keen to follow up on this, the report you mentioned is called Shifting the Dial, it will be produced every five years, similar to the intergenerational report. Peter, can I ask you the aim of the exercise and why it's timely?
Peter Harris
So most of the work that the productivity commission has in its history been asked to do for government is about specific industries or specific programs or specific sectors of the Australian economy.
This, for the first time, we've been asked to take the whole picture and say where government could potentially make a difference in, I like the term, it's our term, 'shift the dial'. Show how productivity could be lifted in the medium term by governments doing things better, whether that is designing public policy better or acting on our behalf as a purchaser and supplier of services better, but show how we might actually shift the dial.
The term came from discussions that we've had previously in a number of our reports with different submitters, interlocutors, parties that we deal with at round tables who find it really hard to work out how, even though in their particular industry their shop floor productivity is rising, but overall productivity in the Australian economy is not naturally following. The answer usually is, it's a far more complex thing to shift productivity at a national level than it is at a shop floor level. So there is this natural interest in, as it were, how to shift the dial and this government decided to give us the opportunity to come up with something that attempts to address that bigger picture question.
Glyn Davis
So let's talk for a minute about that measure. Throughout the mining boom we kept hearing that our productivity was in drastic decline but people argued that had to do with what we were measuring and the way mining was changing those rules. Since the mining boom ended in a sense we've apparently seen a very sharp increase in productivity which does suggest this is an artefact of what we're measuring rather than a substantial measure of what's happening across the economy. Can you talk to that question?
Peter Harris
The oddity, the extreme oddity that's been occurring amongst developed economies since the mid-2000s is notwithstanding that labour productivity has shifted in most economies, roughly speaking, to where you might expect it to as a result of these kinds of cyclical investment factors. But productivity that gives us the .01, which I'm going to revert to a form of conversation that we use here, the multifactor productivity, has been either zero or negative in the Australian economy and in most developed economies since the mid-2000s.
That is, that secret extra bit that somehow we get from combining another unit of capital, another unit of labour, it's always given us more than [not] one additional unit of production that we expected. That's reverted to close to zero or negative across developed economies, not just Australia but certainly in Australia, and we remain in this position where, if you like, the secret additional bit that we get, secret in the sense that we're not quite sure of why although we have a number of plausible scenarios for why but nevertheless we're not sure, that's something we're not sure about is now negative or zero and for a sustained period.
In other words, a period long enough to worry about it. If you've got a negative or a zero in multifactor productivity in one year or one couple of years, you could rationally dismiss that, but decade long now and across the developed world, that's a genuine worry.
Reflected inside that - you mentioned innovation, Glyn, in your introduction - and reflected in that is notwithstanding innovation and investment in innovation, we appear to be in decline. How is that possible? How is that possible on a sustained basis? You would imagine that the businesses would rationally say, geeze, we're only getting 99.9 as it were for the additional unit of labour and the additional unit of capital and we always used to get 1.01, let's stop investing.
Glyn Davis
Why would we invest?
Peter Harris
Now there would be a genuine worry, wouldn't it? Because let's stop investing says let's not produce the tools for the future. We can't allow that to happen, from a government perspective, a public policy design person such as myself, it's inherent in me we can't allow that to happen. We can't allow the paradigm to settle in minds that drive investment in the Australian economy amongst parties who design the public policy that backs up investment such as educators, such as the institutions that you're engaged in. We can't allow that mindset to settle that, oh, it's okay that this might have all just turned negative. It's not okay. We must be trying to look for solutions.
Glyn Davis
You've touched a couple of times on service sector and on education, and indeed a treasury reported that the service sector will remain responsible for growth prospects and productivity in the long run. Can you say a bit about the focus of the productivity commission on say health and education?
Not surprisingly, as someone in the education sector which produces close to 20 billion dollars a year in exports, how does government expect to address productivity in a sector like this?
Peter Harris
This is substantial focus of the Shifting the Dial report. It says to government, government collectively, state and federal, you're responsible for this sector, you design the inputs, you price them in many cases, you purchase them on behalf of people in many cases at prices that you have set. You are so heavily involved in these sectors which are crucial to the lives to Australians and yet we do not treat them as being analytical creatures in the same way we treat the rest of the Australian economy.
We're talking here in health and education alone and this is leaving aged-care out of health because I could bulk up the numbers by putting in aged care or ancillary services in relation to education such as real estate for students who are accommodated at universities. This is not including those, but those sectors in the last two decades, they've gone from about 10 per cent of the Australian economy to about 15 per cent.
It's a very big shift, but it's a big shift in that timeframe and it's not going to get any smaller because the demands for skills is higher and higher in employment now and so education and that demand for skills that directly links to that sector is going to keep growing regardless of vagaries in the international economy and the terms of trade and everything else that sector's going to keep growing in.
Health, we have an ageing population, we have higher technology, we have more pharmaceuticals and cures to potentially apply. That just means those two sectors alone are going to become ever larger parts of the Australian economy. And every productivity gain if I can use my terminology here, that we can develop in those sectors will be magnified by that continuous growth, as it were, outperform other sectors of the Australian economy over time.
So you get a benefit on top of your benefit to the extent that we can deliver those services more efficiently and to the extent that we can design public policy that ensures that the vast degree of government involvement in this, it's involvement that's aimed at an objective about improving service quality much more than it is aimed at simply the management of fiscal interactions between commonwealth and states for example.
Glyn Davis
Can I ask you again about the measures, because in these service sectors where improving service quality is the objective, are we confident that that gets measured under multifactor productivity?
Peter Harris
I don't think we can say we are confident at all. This is the great difficulty, statistically the system is not set up for us to gather the information that's necessary to do that. Often at the individual operating level you're treating university sector as an industry, the data is not gathered that would enable us to do that, singling out universities as one example. At the macrolevel, as I said, there's a lot of assumption behind the productivity statistics when it involves the non-market economy, simply because it's not as easy to measure the translation of inputs into outputs.
We are to an extent flying blind here, but notwithstanding that, my primary contention is we have to be seen to act because we can't allow this paradigm to settle that it's apparently going to be okay for something that for so long has given us this additional X-factor bonus in terms of reward in the economy, to shift from being positive to negative.
Glyn Davis
Implicit in that for both education and health I guess is the notion that public policy needs to be very sophisticated about what it's trying to do. You need a really seriously well elaborated policy framework if you're going to make a difference to productivity.
Peter Harris
I think that's right, and more importantly if you're going to have it accepted. I'm very conscious in this job that, well, because we are the Productivity Commission and we talk about productivity, nevertheless in health and education sectors I don't think too many practitioners in there would see themselves as being in the game in order to improve productivity. They would see their responsibilities quite differently, and we're not asking them to change their mindset but we are asking governments as the purchasers and the inducers of behaviour and the setters of prices to start considering these things as significant contributors to productivity across the economy.
In other words, the mindset that has to shift is first at government level and then amongst practitioners. Some acceptance that is it not an unreasonable thing regardless of the fact that they would not see themselves as being, as it were, in the game, in order to improve productivity across the Australian economy. But to nevertheless accept that this is a legitimate role for governments, that governments should start thinking in this manner rather than simply think, as I said earlier, in terms of for example the generally contentious costs in terms of fiscal impacts between commonwealth and state.
Glyn Davis
I'd like to turn to another area that's touched on in the report, the energy market. You make some very specific recommendations about the market and you argue through the report that urgent action is required. Why will failure to act in the energy arena hurt Australia's future growth?
Peter Harris
I think alarmingly, uncertainty has arisen and whilst every business faces uncertainty, and it's not the role of government to say, I can offer you all certainty. But in this particular sector, because again the government sets the rules, the government doesn't in some cases directly control prices but certainly controls the mechanism by which prices are set, values the assets and allows that through regulated pricing to be a substantive driver in cost. Because the government does all these things, the government needs to say to itself, am I contributing as much certainty for the parties doing the investing, regardless of whether they are private sector or public sector parties doing the investing in energy, am I creating enough certainty for them in order to invest?
The answer to that is I'm only at best doing it partially. I do have relative certainty for renewables investors, but I do not have certainty outside that. In fact, what I've probably done in allowing a range here, there's not just simply a competition between, as it were, the renewables and the remainder of energy, it's actually across the different pricing elements of the provision of energy, I've allowed the rules and the standards and the ways of behaving to depart from a simple single goal, which is the sufficient provision of energy to see that uncertainty doesn't result in, as it were, prices being bid up simply because I’m not certain about where I'm going to get energy from next year.
Governments haven't delivered that, and they have the responsibility for doing it. In the end, it has to be a sufficiently comprehensive level of certainty to cover not just renewables but the other potential contributing sources of energy.
Glyn Davis
Peter Harris, isn't it the case though that to get that certainty you need a single effective price for carbon? Haven't we been here before and it didn't prove politically intractable last time?
Peter Harris
It doesn't mean it's wrong. We don't go out trying to antagonise governments but governments ask us for advice and I guess the reputation of the entity which I'm proud to be chair is that we don't pull the punches. I guess my hope with governments is they read it for what it is, we think this is the simple truth and yet we're not simply saying, price carbon and all your problems will be solved. We're not saying that. We do actually go probably more in depth to the governance arrangements to these actual structures by which governments themselves intervene in the energy supply arrangements, but conceptually the logic is simple.
As the Finkel report itself was saying, you need to be able to provide a carbon based or an emissions based budget for the industry as a whole that enables the forecasting of opportunities by a government party, the energy market operator, to take that budget for emissions and say, here's our current production of emissions. Whether it is an emissions pricing scheme or whether it is a clean energy target as per the Finkel report, but some kind of paradigm in which the energy market operator can mix the demand forecasts with the emission needs and provide that guidance to potential future investors. Absent both of those, not just one of them but both of them, you're not get certainty of investment.
Glyn Davis
Peter, could we now turn to a couple of institutional questions that are raised in your report. There's a very striking line where you say, there is no sense of a national challenge needing collective effort towards solutions. Two institutions that you name as not working as you feel they should are the Council of Australian Governments, which is the peak intergovernmental forum and the culture in the public service. Can I ask you to speak to both?
Peter Harris
In the case of COAG, not to put too fine a point on it, people who work within the system now and need to have ideas because the ideas can only be effective if they are coordinated nationally between the Commonwealth and state government. People who work within the system that we interacted with in the generation of this report, are the source of that conclusion about COAG not working.
In one celebrated comment made to us, the way that COAG works today is ultimately entirely about short-term deliverables whereas it ought to be about the medium or long term. The more crude response has been, COAG is the place where good policy goes to die.
Now, when from within the system you have that constant level of, I don’t want to say criticism because it's more than criticism, it's disappointment with a structure that it is so important if we are to have a nationally coordinated response to the kinds of initiatives that we propose in our Shifting the Dial report. That is that the institutions itself must change. And yet as we say in the report, this is almost a cost-free shift.
In the case of COAG, the idea of refreshing the commitment to a level of co-operation across the medium-term national public policy requirements, that refresh of mindset is cheap. It rather requires something else which is a deep sense of commitment to a collective national response. Now, we once had that, in your time and my time, Glyn, a couple of decades ago…
Glyn Davis
Back in the day.
Peter Harris
Sounding like old farts talking on the [Bideawee] nursing home veranda at the retirement place for old public servants in my case. We once had that and I refuse to believe that it is impossible to reinstitute it. I guess our hope is that this report will say to governments, see the opportunity, see how clear it is and recognise that your role in delivering this isn't simply to say, well done Productivity Commission we propose to endorse recommendation X, Y and Z. It's to say, we need to refresh the collective effort behind the thinking in a report like this and we commit ourselves to doing so.
In the case of the public service, there's not enough outcome based commitment to enhancing the ability of public servants to design and implement public policy today. That is, that many of the kinds of people that we were interacting with, which are not the CEOs and secretaries and heads of these entities, but the people responsible for delivering programs, were not encouraged to be risk based thinkers and were often not skilled to be risk based thinkers, both in design and in delivery of these kinds of programs. Rather they were encouraged to remain within a quite safe paradigm which doesn't invite necessarily very substantial change.
So we have a recommendation in there on the public sector which we think is quite important and that is, there's a lot of analytical work that has gone on by the various public service commissions and the capability reviews and things like that. There's a lot of analytical work that is available on this, but it seems to rarely translate itself into the obligations upon the leaders of the public sector to take account of that on a continuing medium-term basis again. So we're in this paradigm still of medium term thinking that says there should be some obligation for you to recognise that building capability is tremendously important to being able to deliver the sorts of things we've talked about here.
To that extent we've gone to the level of proposing that there is, as it were, a charter letter in the same sense that ministers when they first take on their portfolio responsibilities at a Commonwealth level get a charter letter form the prime minister saying, I expect you deliver X, Y and Z over the period of government. We see the potential role of the head of PM&C as being able to say that to the heads of agencies and heads of departments and we think the states could do similar things around the capability of the agency they run. That is, take the analysis and turn it into something that is deliverable over the medium-term.
Glyn Davis
Presumably holding them to account as well.
Peter Harris
That's right, holding them to account means performance pay or things like that, and yet consistent with the information that came back to us through the development of this report, that money is really not a very wise driver of a lot of public policy activity, particularly deprivation of pay is not a very wise driver.
I mean, it may work in some specific circumstances but most of the time it is the clear iteration to individuals who are faced with 1000 different responsibilities in running complex agencies, that this one has been elevated from the ruck to the top. This one, in clear articulation terms, belongs to you as a deliverable in your term running this entity.
Glyn Davis
Now we've talked about investment and industry, we've talked about government and policy. I'd like to turn to the community side of this. The OECD report earlier this year stated that while Australia has achieved some of its strongest productivity growth over the past five years, this has not led to any growth in workers' incomes. So does a reform agenda require a new social contract? What changes is the Productivity Commission looking for here?
Peter Harris
I think the question, as I said, of labour productivity having - within the OECD we indeed performed very well at a labour productivity level, versus again other developed nations, but for the form of productivity that most concerns public policy design, that is multifactor productivity, we're just with the rest of them in this negative area. The reason labour productivity probably matters most when you link it to wages is because there's a clear logic link as it were between individuals producing more and the possibility of being paid more.
But the idea of creating a social compact which says we must somehow lock that in beyond that which we currently do apply and so we do have a minimum wage level in Australia and we have reviewed that in the Productivity Commission and we do find it overall a desirable proposition as long as it doesn't move too rapidly to price people as it were out of the labour market, and that minimum wage level does translate substantially through multiple parts of our award system to a good portion of the economy.
So we do have a form by which we can, as it were, maintain wage rewards, what we don't have beyond standard market proposition is the mechanism to say that at this particular point in time in this particular industry because labour productivity has improved there must necessarily be a change in wage structures. If we were to have that, you can't say for the rest of the analysis that governments designing that would necessarily design it particularly well. I think the social compact that works well is an acceptance that an attack on the idea of having some understood link between improved productivity in a workplace and improved reward in a workplace, an attack on that is an undesirable thing. That's the form of social contract that I think can develop, as it were, at the quite microlevel and has a really good chance of being sustainable because it then can shift as circumstances require between the individuals and the workplace and the people who are doing the investing in that same workplace.
Glyn Davis
I'd like to look ahead, the Governor of the Reserve Bank, Philip Lowe in a recent speech in Perth argued that Australia was entering what he called its next chapter in economic growth. Peter, you've been the chairman of the Productivity Commission since 2013, as you mentioned, as you confident that we are creating the conditions for this next chapter to flourish?
Peter Harris
I'm not as certain that we have the construct right in terms of investment opportunity in the Australian economy. I do worry, as I said earlier, that if the mindset settles in which says, you know, we're no longer going to get this return as an economy from multifactor productivity that we've had for so long, if that mindset settles in, it can have an effect on investment.
Investment is important not because it's about the way that people who control capital in the economy make money, investment is most important because it's the mechanism by which we create opportunity. It creates the tools for the future. Labour productivity today is not about extracting sweat from the brow of an individual Australian, it's about working smarter, working better, that's generally created by investment.
I do worry that if we allow this thinking to settle in which says we're no longer going to get the kind of return across the economy that we're used to, that a one per cent growth in national income perpetually is going to be an acceptable future.
Historically we've had two per cent real growth in national income for decade upon decade upon decade. Current circumstance of productivity suggests that we're more likely going to settle at a level half the size of that. Settling at that level in terms of providing incentives for businesses to invest and provide the tools for the future, that would be a worrying thing for me. Thus, improvement in productivity I think is tremendously important to make sure that mindset doesn't settle.
Glyn Davis
Peter, what reception are you hoping for this report Shifting the Dial?
Peter Harris
I'm hoping that we do get this commitment to refresh between Commonwealth and state, the idea of joining together around a joint reform agenda which focuses on the delivery of services in which governments are broadly responsible to all Australians and thus that productivity out of this phase of productivity reform, this next five years can be about how we're delivering better services to Australians. That is, delivering them more efficiently, and more reliability and with greater recognition of the flexibilities that are going to be required for a different economy. The report itself is less about the individual ideas, they're merely there to show how it could be done, but the aspiration itself is the most important thing.
Glyn Davis
Thank you, it's been a fabulous conversation. I've really enjoyed catching up with Peter Harris, the chairman of the Productivity Commission. Peter, thank you.
Peter Harris
Thanks, Glyn.
Glyn Davis
Thank you for listening to The Policy Shop.
Voiceover
This episode is produced by Eoin Hahessy, with audio engineering by Russel Evans. With editing by Eric Van Bemmel. The University of Melbourne. Copyright 2017.
Productivity has lifted incomes across the globe for decades, but is now in decline in the developed world. But what is productivity and should Australia be worried about it?
In this episode of the The Policy Shop, Chairman of the Productivity Commission, Peter Harris AO, discusses the release of Shifting the Dial, the commission’s first five-year review, and the challenges of maintaining Australia’s high standard of living.
Episode recorded: 27 September 2017
Series Producer: Eoin Hahessy
Audio engineers: Eric Van Bemmel & Russell Evans
Banner image: Pixababy