Danielle Wood

And as you say, when you get to the last decade and it bounces around depending on what years you're using.

But if we go 2015 to 2025, labour productivity growth is about 0.4%.

So that's about a quarter of its 60-year average.

So very, very slow compared to what we've been used to over the recent sweep of history.

Look, it's because productivity is a much broader concept than just the sum total of government policy settings.

And so, you know, I could show you charts on productivity for every developed nation over the same period, and you would see a similar step down in productivity growth.

There's a whole lot of structural forces that apply to do with the nature of economy, to do with the role of technology that are outside of government's hands.

Yeah.

So, I mean, there's obviously a whole ton of economic literature on this.

There's not a single answer, but there's a range of different things that have contributed.

So one is just the changing nature of economies themselves.

So as countries get richer, they tend to produce and consume more.

less stuff and produce and consume more services.

And if we look particularly at the kind of very fast growing aspects of services, it tends to be things like care, very labour intensive by nature and hard to get productivity gains in the traditional sense.

Second, we've seen a, you know, almost an investment strike since the global financial crisis.

You know, big drop in investment as a share of GDP, that means less capital, less technology per worker.

Third is technology.

And this one's kind of,

It's hard to grapple with when it feels like technological change is everywhere.

But certainly for the last 20 years, that doesn't mean it won't change in future.