I cannot ever recall a time when the nation’s production, as measured by real GDP, has diverged so much from the growth in Australian’s living standards.
To illustrate why, I have once again deflated three measures of the domestic economy, as provided in the June quarter national accounts (released yesterday), by the ABS’ population data, in order to ascertain the underlying strength of the domestic economy in per capita trend terms.
The three measures chosen are:
- National Disposable Income (NDI), which is “considered a good measure of progress for living standards because it is an indicator of Australians’ capacity to purchase goods and services for consumption” (see ABS explanation here).
- Gross national expenditure (GNE), which is “the total expenditure within a given period by Australian residents on final goods and services (i.e. excluding goods and services used up during the period in the process of production). It is equivalent to gross domestic product plus imports of goods and services less exports of goods and services”.
- Domestic final demand (DFD), which is the sum of “government final consumption expenditure, household final consumption expenditure, private gross fixed capital formation and the gross fixed capital formation of public corporations and general government”.
First, let’s consider real per capita NDI. As shown below, this measure finally rebounded by 0.7% in the June quarter in trend terms to be up by 0.8% over the year. However, real per capita NDI has fallen by 4.0% since December 2011, suggesting falling living standards:
Per capita NDI is also just 0.2% higher than September 2008 – that’s nearly eight years with virtually no growth!
The divergence between per capita NDI and GDP is particularly stark:
Since December 2011, real GDP per capita has risen by 5.0% compared with a 4.0% decline in real per capita NDI.
Similar trends are evident with GNE and DFD, which have also fallen since June 2012, albeit less severely:
The big expansion in commodity export volumes that has occurred in recent years has supporting headline GDP but hidden the fact that the domestic economy remains weak, propped-up by elevated immigration. And because export prices are falling, national income and demand are going backwards, and the domestic economy is essentially experiencing a recession in per capita terms. We are selling more, but receiving less income in return.
To quote Dr Andrew Charlton’s excellent piece in June:
…we are producing more but earning less. In the simplest terms, if Australia was a cafe, we’d be making a lot more coffees but not taking much more money thanks to a price cut… The shop would be busier, but our take-home pay would be lower…
The fact is, whether you’re a cafe or a national economy, you should care less about how much you produce, and more about how much income you earn and the purchasing power of that income.
Sadly, GDP just happens to be the measure that wrongly receives the most attention from economists, commentators and politicians, and not even in per capita terms.
An examination of the national accounts data also shows that real per capita NDI since the onset of the GFC has grown far more slowly than at the same time after the early-1990s recession. Again, real per capita NDI has risen just 0.2% since September 2008 versus 12.8% growth at the same point after the early-1990s recession – with obvious diverging trends (see next chart).
As explained many times before, the key reason for the recent decline in real per capita income is the sharp rise and then fall in the terms-of-trade, which after rising by 39% in the two years to September 2011 has since fallen by 35% (see below charts).
Even Australia’s GDP growth has been lacklustre despite the record mining investment followed by surging export volumes, along with the stimulatory effects of the housing bubble. Once we subtract population growth, Australia’s performance since the GFC has been worse than the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s recessions:
32 quarters after the onset of the GFC (June 2008), GDP per capita has only risen by 7.7%. The trends also are likely to widen the gaps further as the once-in-a-century mining investment boom continues to unwind, the boom in housing construction begins to reverse (probably next year), and the car industry closes by late 2017, offset only partly by rising export volumes.
Those headwinds, combined with minimal growth in per capita income, is why Australia is experiencing its own “lost decade”.
