Labour Productivity

By chance, at 10.45 am today Stats released their Labour productivity stats.  Now this is an important indicator as it is one of the keys to keeping pace with Australia and other economies.  I’ll quote directly from the Stats NZ release:

The strongest period of labour productivity growth was from 1997 to 2000, where solid output growth and declining labour input boosted productivity by 3.5 percent annually. From 2000 onwards, labour productivity growth has averaged 1.4 percent annually, compared with the 28-year average of 2.2 percent.

Now that 1.4% growth is pretty dismal.  But it also drags down the overall 2.2% average.  What was the labour productivty growth from March 91 to March 2000?  It was 3.2% on average.

Oh and in case you were wondering about the other productivity indexes?  Well capital productivity was 1.6% in 1990s compared to 0.0% since 2000.  And multifactor productivity was 2.5% in 1990s compared to 0.7% since 2000.