Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we regularly heard that Australia’s CBD were the drivers of the economy.
For Example, the Grattan Institute in 2014 released a report entitled Mapping Australia’s economy: cities as engines of prosperity, which claimed that the nation’s prosperity was being driven by “city centre jobs in knowledge-intensive businesses”, that CBD businesses were “much more productive on average than those in other areas”, and that the “combined central business districts of Sydney and Melbourne alone – 7.1 square kilometres – generate nearly 10 per cent of the value of goods and services produced in all of Australia”.
The Grattan Institute repeated the CBD spruik in 2017, claiming that “labour markets had been transformed by the growth of services industries” located in CBDs, with the average economic output per hour worked more than $90 in the central business districts of Melbourne and Sydney.
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