Worst decade for living standards ‘in 60 years’

In keeping with MB’s long running “lost decade” theme, a new report from the Productivity Commission (PC) shows that growth in per capita national output and income was significantly below the 60-year average during the 2010s.

The PC’s latest Insights report has concluded that gross national income would have been $11,500 per person higher in 2019-20 if the growth rates over the five decades prior to 2012 had been sustained. The report pins the slowdown on Australia’s poor productivity growth, caused to a significant degree by the ending of the mining boom:

The past decade of economic growth marks the slowest in at least 60 years on a per person basis (figure 26), both in output per person (GDP per capita) and income per person (gross national income, GNI, per capita)…