Light shone on Reserve Bank’s gloomy economic outlook
THE latest Intergenerational Report, the triennial roadmap of the Australian economy’s next 40 years, contains a stack of numbers. But one number came in for greater scrutiny than the others: 1.2 per cent. That’s Treasury’s assumption for how fast productivity will grow each year on average over the next four decades, on which almost every other economic figure in the report was based. While 1.2 per cent is not particularly strong compared to previous decades and the artificial intelligence boom is expected to provide an uplift, productivity growth has only averaged