Sorry, but Medicare needs to change

The apparent success of Labor's scare campaign on the Coalition's alleged plans to "privatise Medicare" at last year's election tells us many things – how much we care about the good performance of our healthcare system, how much we like the way healthcare is paid for under Medicare, and how suspicious we are of politicians' plans to change things.

But Medicare is showing its age. It was designed by health economists in the 1960s, implemented by Gough Whitlam in the 1970s, dismantled by Malcolm Fraser, then reinstalled by Hawke and Keating in the 1980s.

Our health has changed a lot since then. Whereas the system is designed to cope with acute illnesses – you catch a bug or have an accident, so you go to your GP, who fixes the problem or refers you to a specialist or, in the extreme, rushes you to hospital – these days we're more likely to suffer from chronic conditions, such as diabetes, mental illness, lung cancer or cardiovascular disease.

That's because higher living standards, improvements in public health and advances in medical technology have reduced the incidence of accidents and infectious diseases, leaving us living lives that are longer, but more anxious and overweight, while suffering from conditions that will stay with us until we drop off.

If you don't have a chronic illness yet, you probably will.

Trouble is, the ageing Medicare system isn't well-suited to this change. GPs are paid according to the number of patients they see for a few minutes – "fee for service".

They're not rewarded for helping patients change their behaviour in ways that prevent the onset of chronic diseases, nor for helping patients manage their conditions in ways that stop them getting worse over time, or needing to go to hospital.

As healthcare has become more expensive, it's clearer that visits to GPs and other frontline health professionals are relatively cheap, whereas visits to specialists are much dearer. Operations and stays in hospital are hugely expensive.

Get it? We could improve people's health and happiness and reduce expense if we made sure the "primary care" provided by GPs and others was as effective as possible in preventing and managing chronic conditions, reducing the need to call on specialists and hospitals.

All this is the thinking behind the Productivity Commission's advocacy of a "new policy model" that shifts tax changes, deregulation and privatisation onto the backburner, and shifts healthcare (and education and cities) to the forefront of economic reform.

The health system suffers from its division of responsibility between federal and state governments, with the states responsible for public hospitals and the feds for most of the rest.

Lack of co-ordination between the parts of the system generates much wasted time and money, not to mention inconvenience and frustration for patients.

So the commission wants a renewed effort to achieve an integrated system.

"The international and Australian experiences with integrated care indicate that, if properly implemented, it leads to gains in health outcomes for patients, improvements in the patient experience of care, reductions in costs, and improved job satisfaction for clinicians," the commission says.

The place for this integration to occur is at the local, regional level. There are about 30 regions in Australia. The commission wants regional health authorities to have freedom to modify national arrangements to suit local conditions.

Public hospitals have already been organised into "local hospital networks" but, after protracted disagreement between Labor and the Coalition, the feds are only now setting up private "primary health networks" contracted to co-ordinate patient care in their locality, including by working collaboratively with the local hospital network.

It's almost inevitable that big outfits like hospitals – but even doctors' surgeries – tend to be run for the convenience of the outfit, rather than the patient.

But the commission wants changes that encourage the system to focus on patients rather than suppliers.

"Patient-centred care gives prominence to the preferences, needs and values of consumers. In a better system, patients' time would be recognised. Patients would be given the information and power to be co-contributors to treatments and disease management," the commission says.

"Medical records would be owned by patients and they would be able to add comments. The commission sees such rights to data as a broad requirement across many public and private services. Where choice was feasible, it would be facilitated."

The digital age has largely eliminated the excuse for different parts of the system – including different doctors – not keeping each other fully informed, and doing so via the patient's own, digitised and portable medical record.

This idea isn't new, but doctors have been dragging their feet and governments need to renew their determination to make it happen.

Using fee-for-service as the main way of paying doctors encourages activity (more visits) whereas it would be better to reward outcomes – successful efforts at preventing chronic conditions or stopping people from needing to go to hospital.

Fee-for-service would continue under a regionally based integrated care model, but its role would diminish as primary health networks and local hospital networks found other ways to remunerate GPs for clinical outcomes.

Little of all this is new, and governments are unlikely to do it all next week. Rather, it's the commission setting priorities for economic reform in general, and healthcare in particular, and urging governments to get on with bringing it to pass.

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Report heralds big change in economic reform priorities

Government reports come and go with great rapidity. Some are acted on, most are quickly pigeonholed. Last week Scott Morrison tabled a report from the Productivity Commission called Shifting the Dial, but it was soon lost amid all the excitement about raids on a union and politicians being thrown out of their jobs.

Despite this inauspicious beginning, let me make a fearless prediction: when the history of the economy in the early decades of the 21st century is written, this report will get prominence.

Why? Not because this government or the next will rush out to implement its recommendations, but because it will be seen as a turning point in the thinking of the nation's economic advisers.

The populist revolt against the doctrines of "neoliberalism" – or economic rationalism, as we've called it in Australia – has been apparent for most of this year. It's been apparent since the middle of the year that the long-running bipartisan consensus in support of neoliberalism in the advanced economies has collapsed.

But where to now? The economy and its apparatus are far from perfect and there's always something that needs working on. The econocrats need something to be working on to justify their existence, so what are they to do now that so many citizens are jack of deregulation and privatisation?

Well, now we know. Ostensibly, the commission's report is just the first of many five-yearly reports on ways to improve the economy's "productivity" – its ability to increase its outputs of goods and services faster than the increase in its inputs of land, labour and capital – the magic that's made us so much richer than our great-grandparents.

The Productivity Commission, would you believe, is preoccupied with productivity. Same old, same old.

Don't be deceived. The commission – formerly a leader of the economic rationalist charge – has taken the initiative in proposing an agenda for economic improvement that's quite different to what we've had so far.

Its new agenda attempts to restore public support for economic "reform" (a word it tries to avoid) by responding to popular criticism of the push that, while well-intentioned and necessary when it originated in the Hawke-Keating years, has since seemed to degenerate into "bizonomics" – what's good for big business is good for the rest of us.

Gone is the unending obsession with tax reform (cutting the rates of tax on companies and high-earning individuals) and industrial relations (cutting penalty rates and shifting bargaining power in favour of employers).

In their place, the commission focuses on three big issues: healthcare, education and cities.

On health, it argues there needs to be more emphasis on preventing and managing the growing incidence of chronic illnesses, such as diabetes. This may involve less reliance on paying doctors according to fee-for-service.

The health system – state-run public hospitals in one box, most doctors in another and pharmaceuticals in a third – needs to be better integrated so as to make it more centred on the needs of patients rather than the suppliers of health care.

This greater co-ordination should happen at the local level.

On education, too many students are being let down at every level.

The commission finds that school results are deteriorating, vocational education and training is "a mess" and universities are more concerned with publishing research papers than improving teaching standards.

As for cities, they produce a growing portion of our gross domestic product – about 80 per cent, with Sydney and Melbourne accounting for half of that.

By the time we reach 2050, almost 11 million extra people will be squeezed into our capital cities, according to Morrison.

The social costs of congestion in our capital cities will grow from almost $19 billion a year in 2015 to more than $31 billion a year by 2030, we're told.

See how different all this is to the economic reform talk we're used to?

It's shifted the focus from business to the "non-market economy" run mainly by government bodies. It's less concerned with mining, farming and manufacturing, and more with the services sector.

Its approach to reform is bottom-up – concentrate on the needs of patients and students, on getting to work – not trickle down.

Putting it another way, it's people-friendly, not business-friendly.

The three issues are two-sided: they directly affect the wellbeing of individuals, but also the nation's productivity, as a healthier, better-skilled workforce gets to work more easily.

This means the "reform agenda" ought to be a lot more relevant and appealing to ordinary voters. It also means it can be pursued by either side of politics.

One of the great objections to the old agenda was fear that it benefited the better-off at the expense of the rest of us.

Rest easy – the commission has got the message.

"A key issue will be to ensure that future economic, social and environmental policies sustain inclusive [note that word]growth – by no means guaranteed given current policy settings, and prospective technological and labour market pressures ...

"One of the advantages of better healthcare, education systems and cities is that they provide strong prospects for improving lifetime outcomes for people from all backgrounds.

"Indeed, improvements in these areas have the potential to decrease health inequalities, and reduce job insecurity and wage risks for those whose skills are at most risk from technological change," the commission concludes.

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Turns out productivity's been fine all along

What a joke. A scholarly article in Treasury's latest Economic Roundup has admitted that all the years of handwringing over our poor productivity performance was just jumping at shadows.

Turns out all the angst was caused by not much more than the figures being distorted by the mining industry's construction boom.

This after our top econocrats gave speech after speech urging "more micro reform" to improve productivity and keep living standards rising. (They'd have advocated more reform even if productivity was improving at record rates; its supposed weakness was just a convenient selling proposition.)

Meanwhile, the business lobby groups, led by the Business Council of Australia, claimed – without any evidence – the supposed weakness had been caused by the "reregulation" of wage fixing under Labor's evil Fair Work changes, and demanded the balance of bargaining power be shifted yet further in favour of employers. (A claim even the Productivity Commission wasn't convinced by.)

Even at the time, it seemed the contortions of the mining industry during the decade-long resources boom were a big part of the story, but that didn't stop people who should have known better going into panic mode.

"Despite concerns", the paper by Simon Campbell and Harry Withers, says with masterful understatement, "Australia's labour productivity growth over recent years is in line with its longer-term performance.

"In the five years to 2015-16, labour productivity in the whole economy has grown at an average annual rate of 1.8 per cent.

"This compares to an average annual rate of 1.4 per cent over the past 15 years, and 1.6 per cent over the past 30 years," it says.

Let's take a step back. Productivity compares the quantity of the economy's output of goods and services with the quantity of inputs of resources used to produce the output.

When output grows faster than inputs – as it does most years – we're left better off. This improvement in our productivity is the overwhelming reason for the increase in our material standard of living over the years and centuries.

Productivity can be measured different ways. The simplest (and least likely to be inaccurate) way is to measure the productivity of labour: growth in output per worker or, better, per hour worked.

Labour productivity improvement is caused by two factors. The first is by increases in the ratio of (physical) capital to labour used in the economy.

This known as "capital deepening" – translation: giving workers more tools and machines to work with, which makes them more productive.

The second driver of labour productivity is improvements in the efficiency with which labour inputs and capital inputs are used, arising from such things as improved management practices. This is known as MFP – multi-factor productivity.

In recent years the figures have shown multi-factor productivity growth to be zero or even negative, causing great concern among some economists, including the Productivity Commission.

But Campbell and Withers argue this focus on MFP is misplaced. They remind us that MFP is calculated as a residual (the product of a sum), meaning its likelihood of mismeasurement is high.

And they criticise the conventional view that physical capital should grow no faster than output – known as "balanced growth" - because capital deepening is an inferior source of productivity improvement to MFP.

People take this view because (making the unrealistic assumption that the economy is closed to transactions with foreigners) increased investment in physical capital must come at the expense spending on consumption.

The authors point out that achieving improved MFP isn't costless, while the price of capital goods (most of which are imported) has fallen persistently relative to the price of consumption goods.

"This has allowed Australia to sustain its high rate of capital deepening without forgoing ever higher levels of consumption," they say.

Actually, they say, our economy has never fitted the "balanced growth" story. Of the 30-year average of 1.6 per cent annual growth in labour productivity, MFP contributed only 0.7 percentage points, while capital deepening contributed 0.9 points.

Next the authors examine the causes of the ups and downs in labour productivity improvement overall by breaking the economy into six sectors: agriculture, mining, manufacturing, utilities, construction and services (everything else).

They find that labour productivity in agriculture is now 2 1/2 times its level in 1989, but it's too small a part of the economy – 2.5 per cent – for this to make much difference to the economy-wide story.

The utilities sector showed strong productivity growth until the turn of the century, before steadily declining through to 2011-12, mainly because of one-off developments such as the building, then mothballing of many desal plants.

The story of mining is well-known: its productivity fell because of the delay between companies hiring more workers to build new mines and gas facilities and that extra production coming on line. Since 2012-13, however, mining productivity has shot up. What a surprise.

Productivity in manufacturing and construction has grown at similar rates to the economy overall, as has productivity in the services sector (hardly a surprise since services now account for 70 per cent of gross domestic product).

Over the past five years, more than half of our total labour productivity improvement was attributable to the services sector, compared with about a quarter attributable to mining.

Apart from productivity improvement in the various sectors, overall productivity can be affected when changes in the industry structure of the economy cause workers to shift from lower-productivity sectors to higher-productivity sectors, or vice versa.

Because mining, being highly capital-intensive, has by far the highest level of labour productivity, the authors say it's really only when workers move in or out of mining that structural change has much effect on economy-wide productivity.

"These movements of labour into and out of mining have been the key driver behind the fluctuations in ... aggregate labour productivity growth," the report concludes.

Now they tell us.

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Many guesses why productivity may have stopped improving

Conventional economics is falling apart, no longer making the sense we thought it made. Economists are entering a period of puzzlement and uncertainty, while their high priests struggle to hold the show together.

You can tell all that if you read between the lines of the Productivity Commission's discussion paper launching its inquiry into Increasing Australia's future prosperity, published last month.

It’s meant to be the first five-yearly review of our productivity performance, the micro-economic equivalent of Treasury’s (misnamed and now politically hijacked) five-yearly macro-economic intergenerational reports.

So it has potential to be a big deal. If you missed hearing about the discussion paper it may be because it was overshadowed that week by something that happened to a Mr Trump.

The commission opens its discussion with the alarming observation that "there is a justified global anxiety that growth in productivity – and the growth in national income that is inextricably linked to it over the longer term – has slowed or stopped".

Productivity is a measure of an economy's (or a business's) ability to convert inputs of resources into outputs of goods and services.

We commonly (and least inaccurately) measure it as output per unit of labour input – per worker or per hour worked.

But the commission prefers to measure it as output per unit of both labour and capital inputs, which it calls "multi-factor productivity". This is intended to be a measure of the essence of productivity improvement: technological advance and increased human capital.

Trouble is, the commission says, "since 2004, multi-factor productivity has stalled, here and around the developed world. This is a long enough period to suggest something is seriously awry in the economic fundamentals and the consequent generation of national wealth and individual opportunity."

Actually, by the commission's own figuring, Australia's labour productivity in the "12-industry market economy" improved by 1.9 per cent in 2014-15, the most recent year available, and our multi-factor productivity improved by 0.8 per cent, which was also our average rate of multi-factor improvement over the previous 40 years.

It's true, however, that our multi-factor performance has looked pretty sick since the turn of the century.

But the first point to note is that the problem is global, not just some weakness of ours – a fact a lot of those who've used our weak numbers to push their own favoured "reforms" have often failed to mention.

Next point, which is also often not mentioned: economists can't measure multi-factor productivity with even remote accuracy. That's mainly because they can only guess at the contribution one unit of physical capital (whatever that is) makes to production.

So it's hard to be sure the weak multi-factor productivity figures most developed countries are producing are real.

Next, assuming they are real, economists can only guess at the factors causing them. There's a lot of guessing going on by some of the world's top economists, but as yet there are no policy changes we could make with any confidence that they'd fix the problem.

Our eponymous commission produces an annual update on our productivity figures but, though it's been wringing its hands for years, its analysis has never once been able to put its finger on a causal factor we could do something about.

The few explanations it's found are either temporary or nothing to worry about.

The discussion paper acknowledges, but then dismisses, the argument of those wondering if the whole "problem" is merely a product of monumental mismeasurement.

I don't dismiss it. Had the economists not assured us of the opposite, most of us would look at the wonders of the digital revolution and the many industries being hit by digital disruption and assume the productivity indicators must be going gangbusters.

How can we be sure they aren't? One of our most thoughtful economists – one who's always gloried in digital advances – is professor John Quiggin, of the University of Queensland.

Quiggin argues that the economists' conventional model for thinking about the economy and how it grows is based on an industrial economy, which made sense in the 19th and 20th centuries, but is becoming increasingly outmoded and misleading.

We focus hard on the production of goods – agriculture, mining and manufacturing – but are vaguer about the production of services, which is the main part of the economy that's growing.

Today, he says, the primary engine of economic development is information, but information has radically different characteristics to a physical good or a service such as a haircut.

Information is often free ("non-excludable", as economists say) and it can't be used up ("non-rivalrous").

This outdated, industrial-age way of thinking about growth and productivity is reflected in the way we define and measure the economy and productivity via gross domestic product.

For instance, we measure only economic activity in markets, meaning we exclude all the activity taking place in households, and can't measure the productivity of the 20 per cent of GDP created in the public sector, including such minor industries as health and education.

And we ignore one of the most valuable outcomes of the greater prosperity that is the Productivity Commission's god: hours of leisure.

None of this, however, will stop the commission using its ultimate report to advocate a bunch of "reforms" intended to improve our small corner of the world's alleged productivity problem.

As we speak, Canberra's second biggest industry – the lobbyists – are busy churning out their self-interested submissions to the inquiry, advocating such radical new ideas as cutting company tax and weekend penalty rates.

To be fair, the commission says it's "particularly interested in new and novel ideas because there is already a strong awareness of many reform options that parties would like to see implemented. More of the same is not likely to be helpful."

We'll see how far it gets with that fond hope.

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Don’t be sure lower penalties mean more jobs

The argument that reducing or eliminating weekend penalty wage rates would have great economic benefits is obvious to all business people and economists – but not to me. I think it's fallacious.

The received wisdom was well expressed by Anna McPhee, of the Retail Council: "The rebalancing of penalty rates to reflect the needs of the modern economy will mean retailers can create jobs to meet increased consumer demand, which in turn will benefit the economy more broadly."

She was responding, of course, to the proposal in the Productivity Commission's draft report on Australia's Workplace Relations Framework that Sunday penalty rates in the hospitality, entertainment, retailing, restaurant and cafe industries be cut to the same level as Saturday penalty rates.

Even the commission goes along with the received wisdom: "Excessive penalty rates for Sundays reduce hours worked, mean unemployment is higher than it needs to be, and reduce options for businesses and consumers. Trading hours are likely to be lower and capital under-utilised."

But I believe such thinking rests on a fallacy of composition, that what's true for the individual must be true for the whole.

It's not hard to see why particular business people, thinking only of the circumstances of their own business, see lower penalty rates leading to more sales, higher profits and, as a pleasant side-effect, more not-so-well-paid casual employees.

There would be some, of course, who looked no further than benefit of the lower wage rates they'd be paying even if they didn't bother opening their business for more days or longer hours than they are at present.

And, indeed, since they'd now be earning more than they were, that might be enough for some.

But let's assume the owners of the affected businesses really did want to open longer, sell more and profit more. Their fixed costs would now be spread over more sales, while their main variable cost – wages – would be lower per hour.

Question is: where would all these extra sales come from? From rivals that didn't bother opening on Sundays? That advantage isn't likely to last.

From businesses in other industries that now sold less during the week because their customers were seizing the opportunity to spend more on the weekend?

Of course, even if that were true it need be of no concern to any business person confident of being able to sell more. Their motive is to make more money and that's all a market economy expects of them.

But here's my point: just because some businesses can make more and employ more, this doesn't do much for the economy overall if their success comes at the expense of other businesses that make less and employ fewer.

When the advocates of lower penalty rates tell us that many extra jobs will be created, they're surely expecting us to take that as meaning more jobs overall, not just more jobs in some industries but fewer in others.

So let's switch to a macro or, as the commission likes to say, "economy-wide" perspective. We're told it will be great because, with more businesses open on the weekend, consumers will spend more and it's this extra spending that will create more jobs.

But how much the nation's consumers spend is ultimately constrained by their income. Are we expecting that consumers will spend more by saving less? Why would this be a good thing?

Why are we compelling employees to save 9.5 per cent of their wages if we really don't care about people saving much? (And don't mind being more reliant on foreign investment as a consequence.)

Maybe so as to spend more on weekend entertainment the nation's consumers might borrow more – on their credit cards or however. Would this be good for the economy? In any case, borrowing to boost your consumption is not something the nation's consumers can go on doing for long.

I don't believe there is much scope for us to be consuming a lot more than we are already – certainly not over the medium term. If so, then a lot of the businesses that sell more will be taking sales from other businesses.

And there's another possibility, one I suspect is quite likely: those businesses that open for longer on the weekend will sell more at the weekend, but less during the week.

To the extent that businesses achieve nothing more than spreading essentially the same amount of sales over longer opening hours – which I think is quite likely – they're likely to be worse off rather than better. The economy-wide benefits will be small, as will the net gain in employment.

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We're not doing too badly on productivity

Rummaging through the media's rubbish bins this week, I happened upon some good news. According to the Productivity Commission's annual update, the productivity of labour improved by 1.4 per cent in 2013-14.

And get this: in the 12-industry "market sector" of the economy, it improved by 2.5 per cent in that year and by 3.7 per cent the year before.

To give you an idea, the 40-year average rate of market-sector productivity improvement is 2.3 per cent. So, despite all the worrying we've been doing in recent years about our poor productivity performance, it seems we're now doing quite well.

In which case, how come no one wanted to tell us? I can think of three reasons. First is the media's assumption that good news is of little interest to their customers.

Second is that the Productivity Commission's preference is for brushing aside the labour productivity figures and getting us to focus on the figures for "multi-factor productivity", which show an improvement of just 0.4 per cent in 2013-14 and 0.4 per cent the year before. This compares with the 40-year average of 0.8 per cent a year.

Third is that the nation's economists are engaged in a campaign to persuade us we need a lot more micro-economic reform so as to raise our rate of productivity improvement and, hence, the rate at which our material standard of living is rising.

They'd make the same argument whether our productivity performance was good, bad or indifferent, but it helps the selling job if they leave us with the impression our recent performance is poor.

Anyway, let's take a closer look at the commission's new figures. Productivity, which compares the growth in the output of goods and services with the growth in inputs of labour and capital, is a measure of the efficiency of our production. When outputs grow faster than inputs, the economy – the economic machine, so to speak – has become more efficient.

The simplest (and probably least inaccurate) way of measuring productivity is to take the increase in the quantity of goods and services produced during the year and divide it by the increase in the total number of hours worked to produce the stuff.

The main way to increase the productivity of workers is to give them more machines to work with. But the commission believes a more revealing measure is multi-factor productivity. You calculate this by dividing the increase in output by the increase in labour inputs plus the increase in capital inputs (use of machines and other equipment).

The main thing causing an increase in multi-factor productivity is technological advance – the invention of better machines plus improved ways of running businesses. But also improvements in "human capital" – the rising education and skill of the workforce.

That's all fine in theory, but it gets pretty ropey in practice. For a start, we have no way of measuring the productivity of the public sector (healthcare, education and public administration) because, for the most part, it doesn't sell its output in the market.

The market sector covers the financial services, mining, construction, manufacturing, transport, retail trade, wholesale trade, information media and telecommunications, electricity gas and water, agriculture, accommodation and food services, arts and recreation services, rental hiring and real estate services, professional scientific services, administrative support services, and "other" services industries.

That's 16 industries – though, for reasons it doesn't explain, the commission's 12-industry measure of market sector productivity doesn't include the last four industries on that list. Even so, the 12 industries account for 65 per cent of gross domestic product.

A much more serious problem is that the measurement of multi-factor productivity is quite dodgy. It's measured as a residual, meaning that any error in measuring the three other items in the sum will (and does) make the measurement of multi-factor productivity wrong.

More particularly, economists have no way of accurately measuring capital inputs. Just one of their problems is that they can't distinguish between more machines and better machines, meaning their so-called measure of multi-factor productivity excludes much of the technological advance it purports to measure.

The besetting sin of economists is the way they confidently quote their figures to a trusting public, without breathing a word about the data deficiencies and dubious assumptions that lie behind their calculations. When they fail to issue a product warning, it's the duty of the conscientious economic journalist to call them out.

In such circumstances, the commission's results need to be treated with scepticism – particular when, as was true in the noughties, they were so unprecedentedly low as to be implausible.

But let's look at the commission's breakdown of the latest year's supposedly weak result of 0.4 per cent. Half of the 12 industries – all of them in the services sector – achieved remarkably strong improvements, ranging between 1.1 per cent and 5.4 per cent.

Three industries – mining, construction, agriculture – had growing production but marginally declining multi-factor productivity. We know the problems in mining and construction are temporary. Agriculture's poor performance came mainly from drought.

The last three industries – utilities, manufacturing and transport – suffered declining production but lesser declines in inputs, meaning their multi-factor productivity deteriorated quite significantly.

We know the utilities, particularly electricity and gas, are coping with major structural changes, not helped by the earlier misregulation of poles and wires. We know manufacturing is still recovering from the high exchange rate caused by the resources boom. Whatever transport's problem is – we're not told – it will get over it.

That's the trouble with the supposedly worrying figures for multi-factor productivity. Apart from the ropiness of their calculation, when you investigate the stories for the particular industries involved you can't find anything major to worry about.

I'd say that, despite all the barrow-pushers wanting to use poor productivity figures to bolster whatever cause they're promoting, we're not doing too badly on productivity.

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How to reform industrial relations

Tony Abbott's strategy for getting back into government was to make himself a small target by adopting few controversial policies. He mollified his big business backers by promising to hold many inquiries and take any proposals for controversial reform to the 2016 election.

But once in government Abbott couldn't avoid announcing many unpopular measures to get the budget back on track. These have hit his standing in the polls, while causing difficulty and delay in getting budget measures through the Senate.

It's likely a lot of them won't pass, implying the government will have to put a lot of effort into finding more palatable savings. Even then, some of this year's unpopular measures - particularly the age-pension changes - will have to be defended at the election.

Meanwhile, most of a year has passed without the government getting on with its promised inquiries into controversial issues such as industrial relations, tax reform and federal-state relations (think three letters: GST).

Not a lot of time is left for the various inquiry processes to report, for the government to consider the reports, decide what reforms it proposes and then explain and justify them to voters before the election.

Does Abbott's unexpected radicalism on budget measures presage equally radical proposals in these other issues? If so, the next election campaign will be a lot more exciting than the last one.

Or does all the hostility he has aroused just with his budget measures make it more likely Abbott won't want to bite off a lot more trouble on other fronts?

On the question of industrial relations reform, Abbott and his minister, Eric Abetz - not to mention the Productivity Commission, which will be conducting the inquiry - would do well to ponder a recent speech by Geoff McGill, a long-experienced industrial practitioner and now a visiting scholar at Sydney University's Workplace Relations Centre.

McGill observes that the history of federal industrial relations legislation "has been punctuated by swings in the IR pendulum across the political cycle". First the Howard government's Work Choices swung the pendulum in favour of employers, then the Labor government's Fair Work swung it back towards the unions.

Now big business and its cheer squad in the national dailies want the restored Coalition government to give the IR pendulum another shove back in the direction to the employers. Isn't this the way the political game is played?

It is. But McGill questions whether continuing to play that way is the best way to get where we want to go. The advocates of yet another round of industrial relations "reform" justified it mainly by arguing the need for faster improvement in the productivity of labour.

That's something all sides can agree is a desirable objective. But McGill shoots down some wishful thinking on the topic. "Productivity growth is a complex process and usually described in simplistic terms," he says. "It can never be assumed and is only evident after the event.

"There is little evidence to support claims that particular changes in industrial relations legislation will boost national labour productivity."

It's the substance of the employment relationship, not its legal form, which determines whether people are engaged and productive, he says. Productive workplaces are not the outcome of legislation, but of the quality of leadership and culture at the workplace.

Surely there must be a law against someone speaking such obvious sense.

McGill brings to mind another point. Much of the thinking behind "the end of entitlement" and the unpopular budget measures is about saying governments can't solve all your problems for you (just the opposite of the message all politicians spread during election campaigns). It's not possible and, in any case, it's not healthy for people to be so dependent on the authorities.

True enough. But if that's what the government is telling everyone from the young unemployed to uni students to age pensioners, why is it allowing big business to imagine its industrial relations problems should - or even could - be solved by the government changing the law?

Actually, my guess is most of business isn't silly enough to think that. The push is probably coming from lobbyists trying to justify their fee, journos trying to sell newspapers and a relative handful of belligerent employers facing equally belligerent unions and hoping the government will give them some new stick to beat over the heads of their opponents.

Another point of McGill's: if we want better industrial relations leading to greater productivity improvement and the main way for employers to bring this about lies in the workplace, maybe a better way to encourage them to focus on the domestic challenge is to give them a period of legislative stability rather than more changes in the rules of the game.

Most successful managers understand that getting along with people - winning their regard, respect, support, trust, loyalty and co-operation - works better than getting heavy and legalistic. That's how you get better industrial relations - by, as McGill says, putting more emphasis on the relations and less on the industrial.

Managers like to be kept in the loop. Guess what? So do workers. Smart managers keep their staff well informed about the company's performance and the challenges it faces, and give early warnings - even to the union - about any need for nasties like redundancies. They never risk a breakdown in relations by telling workers things they subsequently discover to be untrue.

You engender co-operation by treating people well, consulting them, giving them a degree of autonomy, rewarding loyalty and sharing the business's proceeds fairly between shareholders, managers and staff. Workers accept a hierarchical pay structure, but you don't cause envy and disaffection by rewarding some equals more than others.

And if you don't like outside union officials coming into your workplace, you keep your workers so happy they never need to call them in.

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Your guide to business entitlement

With the Abbott government's close relations with big business, we're still to see whether its reign will be one of greater or less rent-seeking by particular industries. So far we have evidence going both ways.

We've seen knockbacks for the car makers, fruit canners and Qantas, but wins for farmers opposing the foreign takeover of GrainCorp and seeking more drought assistance, as well as a stay on the big banks' attempt to water down consumer protection on financial advice.

The next test will be the budget. Will the end of the Age of Entitlement apply just to welfare recipients (especially the politically weak, e.g. the unemployed and sole parents, rather than politically powerful age pensioners) or will it extend to "business welfare"?

With Joe Hockey searching for all the budget savings he can find, there's a lot of business welfare or, euphemistically, "industry assistance" to look at. The Productivity Commission measures it every year in its Trade and Assistance Review.

Government assistance to industry is provided in four main ways: through tariffs (restrictions on imports), government spending, tax concessions and regulatory restrictions on competition. Although much rent-seeking takes the form of persuading governments to regulate markets in ways that advantage your industry, the benefit you gain is hard to measure, so it's not included in the commission's figuring.

Assistance through tariffs is far less than in the bad old days before micro-economic reform, but there's still some left. However, its cost is borne directly by consumers in the form of higher prices. So it's not relevant to Hockey's search for budget savings. Even so, I'll give you a quick tour.

The commission estimates that, in 2011-12, tariffs allowed manufacturing industries (plus the odd rural industry) to sell their goods for $7.9 billion a year more than they otherwise would have.

In the process, however, this forced up the cost of goods used by manufacturers and other industries as inputs to their production of goods and services by $6.8 billion a year. About 30 per cent of this cost to inputs was borne by the manufacturers themselves, leaving about 70 per cent borne by other industries, largely the service industries.

(This, by the way, shows why import protection doesn't help employment as non-economists imagine it does. It may prop up manufacturing jobs, but it's at the expense of jobs everywhere else in the economy.)

So now we get to budgetary assistance to industry. On the spending side of the budget it can take the form of direct subsidies, grants, bounties, loans at concessional interest rates, loan guarantees, insurance arrangements or even equity (capital) injections.

On the revenue side of the budget it can take the form of concessional tax deductions, rebates or exemptions, preferential tax rates or the deferral of taxation. In 2011-12, the total value of budgetary assistance was $9.4 billion, with just over half that coming from spending and the rest from tax concessions.

Often people will virtuously assure you their outfit doesn't receive a cent of subsidy from the government, but omit to mention the special tax breaks they're entitled to. Think-tanks that rail against government intervention and the Nanny State, hate admitting they're sucking at the teat because the donations they receive are tax deductible (causing them to be higher than otherwise, but at a cost to other taxpayers).

This is why economists call tax concessions "tax expenditures" - to recognise that, from the perspective of the budget balance and of other taxpayers, it doesn't matter much whether the assistance comes via a cheque from the government or via the right to pay less tax than you otherwise would.

Of the total budgetary assistance in 2011-12 of $9.4 billion, 15 per cent went to agriculture, 7 per cent to mining, 19 per cent to manufacturing and 45 per cent to the services sector (leaving 14 per cent that can't be allocated to particular industries).

To put that in context, remember that agriculture's share of gross domestic product (value-added) is about 3 per cent, mining's is 10 per cent and manufacturing's is 8 per cent, leaving services contributing about 79 per cent.

Within manufacturing, the recipients of the most business welfare are motor vehicles and parts, $620 million, metal and metal fabrication, $270 million, petroleum and chemicals, $220 million, and food and beverage processors, $110 million.

Within services, the big ones are finance and insurance, $910 million, property and professional services, $610 million, and arts and recreation, $350 million.

But if you combine tariff and budgetary assistance, then compare it with the industry's value-added (share of GDP), you get a different perspective on which industries' snouts are deepest in the trough. The "effective rate of combined assistance" is 9.4 per cent for motor vehicles and parts, 7.3 per cent for textiles, clothing and footwear, and 4.7 per cent for metal and metal fabrication.

Get this: outside manufacturing, the most heavily assisted goods industry relative to the size of its contribution to the economy is forestry and logging on 7.2 per cent. We pay a huge price to destroy our native forests.

Within services, the most heavily assisted industry is the one where incomes are so much higher than anywhere else: financial services. Virtually all the assistance picked up in the commission's calculations comes via special tax breaks, such as the tax concession for offshore banking units and the reduced withholding tax on foreigners receiving distributions from managed investment trusts.

But that ain't the half of it. These calculations don't pick up two big free kicks: the benefit to the industry because the government forces almost all workers to hand over 9.25 per cent of their pay to be "managed" by it, and the benefit it gains from having one of its main products, superannuation, so heavily subsidised by other taxpayers.

Cut these fat cats? Naah, screwing people on the dole would be much easier.

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Many economists don't get the labour market

The world is full of economists who, though they know little of the specifics of labour economics, confidently propose policies for managing the labour market based on their general knowledge of the neo-classical model. All markets are much the same, aren't they?

I fear this is the best we'll get from the Productivity Commission's inquiry into regulation of the labour market. So a test of the commission's report will be whether it displays knowledge of advanced thinking on how labour markets actually work or is just another neo-liberal rant about free markets.

In their efforts to bone up on the topic, the commissioners could do worse than start with a quick read of Nobel laureate Robert Solow's 90-page classic, The Labor Market as a Social Institution.

Since the book was published in 1990, it should be old hat to economists, but I doubt it is. If so, it shows how little effort most economists - even academic economists - have put into studying the labour market.

Solow starts by reminding economists of a glaring problem they prefer not to think about: if the market for labour is just a market like any other market, and so is capable of being adequately analysed by the economists' standard tool kit of demand and supply - prices adjust until demand and supply are equal and the market "clears" - how come the labour market never clears?

How come we always have high unemployment, which shoots up during downturns and stays very high for years before falling only slowly?

To put the puzzle another way, if the labour market works like any other market, making wages just a price like any other price, why don't wages fall and keep falling as long as the supply of labour exceeds the demand for it?

Why do nominal wages almost never fall? Why is it the closest we ever get is nominal wages not rising as fast as ordinary prices, so wages fall a bit in "real terms"?

In a country with Australia's history of many minimum wages, carefully specified in awards and agreements, it's easy for economists to claim wages can't fall because they're being held up by legal minimums. But this doesn't wash. In reality, many if not most wages are well above the legal minimum, meaning the minimum isn't "binding" and so isn't stopping actual nominal wages from falling back to the minimum. But they don't - and nor do they in the US, where the minimum wage is kept so low it's almost never binding.

Overseas, some extreme neo-classical economists have tried to escape this problem by arguing most unemployment is voluntary rather than involuntary. It just so happens that, when economies turn down, a lot of people decide now's the time to take unpaid holidays and stay on them for many months. Yeah, right.

Solow says a more credible line of explanation is to admit the obvious: there must be something about labour markets that makes them different from other markets (such as the market for cars, or the market for bank loans) and so renders economists' usual analytical tools inadequate.

And it's not hard to think of what that something could be. Other markets are for the purchase and sale of inanimate objects, whereas every unit of labour bought or sold comes with a real live human attached. Every human is different - some are smart, some aren't; some work hard, some don't; some are co-operative, some aren't - and bosses turn out to be humans, too.

The thing about humans is they have egos and feelings and moods. One apple doesn't care about the other apples in the barrel, but a human cares about how they're being treated by their human boss, as well about how they're being treated relative to all the other humans working for the boss.

Hence the title of Solow's book. Unlike other markets, the labour market is also a social institution. Only an economist could imagine you could analyse the labour market successfully without taking account of the human factor.

So maybe it's the social dimension of labour that explains why wages are inflexible and the labour market doesn't clear. Solow uses the work of some woman whose name seems vaguely familiar, a Janet Yellen, and her Noble-prize-winning husband, George Akerlof to outline one possible explanation of the conundrum, "the fair-wage-effort hypothesis".

The "efficiency-wage theory" says that in the modern economy workers often have some control over their own productivity. They produce more when they are strongly motivated to do so. "One way for an employer to provide more motivation is by paying more than other employers do; another is to threaten to fire the excessively unproductive if and when they are detected," Solow says.

If that sounds obvious, note the radical implication: a firm's physical productivity depends not just on how much labour (and capital) it uses, but also on how well the labour is paid. If so, wages won't fall just because unemployment rises.

Yellen and Akerlof's version of efficient-wage theory says workers who believe they're being paid "a fair day's wage" feel a social obligation to deliver "a fair day's work" in return.

A different approach is "insider-outsider theory". This says the people already working for a firm (the insiders) are likely to be more productive than those who aren't (the outsiders) because they understand how the firm works. If so, the insiders are helping to generate "economic rent" for the firm and thus are able to share this rent by negotiating higher wages.

An outsider may be prepared to work for the firm for a smaller wage, but the boss won't want to risk reducing his productivity by switching from insiders to outsiders.

Whichever of those theories you find more persuasive, the point is the workings of real-world labour markets are far more complicated than most economists realise. Let's hope the Productivity Commission does.

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Multi-factor productivity not what it's cracked up to be

Figures for the economy's productivity performance haven't looked good for the past decade, causing consternation among economists and business people. But a careful study by the Productivity Commission has failed to find any particular problem, nor anything we could do to make the figures look better.

Productivity is a measure of the efficiency with which the economy turns inputs of labour and capital into outputs of goods and services. Thus productivity is measured as output per unit of input.

The more we can improve productivity the better off we are. We have in fact being increasing it a little almost every year since the Industrial Revolution, and this is what has made us so much more prosperous. So if you believe the goal of economic management should be to increase our material standard of living (which I don't), nothing is more important than ever-improving productivity.

The simplest (and probably least inaccurate) way to measure productivity is to take the quantity of goods and services produced during a period (real gross domestic product) and divide it by the number of hours of labour required to achieve that production.

Doing this each year shows that our "productivity of labour" improved unusually rapidly in the second half of the 1990s, but then showed little further improvement during most of the noughties. Over the past two or three years, however, it has returned to a reasonably healthy rate of improvement.

But you can improve the productivity of labour simply by giving workers more machines to work with. And this tells us nothing about the efficiency with which the economy's physical capital is being used. So in recent years it has become fashionable to focus on a more sophisticated measure called "multi-factor productivity".

This is the growth in real GDP (output) that can't be explained by any increase in inputs of both labour and physical capital. So, in principle, multi-factor productivity represents "technological progress" - the invention of better physical technology and the discovery of better ways to organise the production of goods and services. It's technological advance that does most to raise material living standards.

When you look at our performance over the past few years you find that, though the productivity of labour has been improving at a reasonable rate, multi-factor productivity hasn't improved. It was this that staff at the aptly named Productivity Commission set out to investigate in a study published last week.

They found that the flat performance of multi-factor productivity in the market economy was explained mainly by an actual decline in the multi-factor performance of manufacturing. So they focused their investigation on manufacturing.

Estimates by the Bureau of Statistics show that between 1998-99 and 2003-04 multi-factor productivity in manufacturing improved at a rate of 1.3 per cent a year. But between 2003-04 and 2007-08 it fell by 1.4 per cent a year. Since then (up to 2010-11) it has deteriorated at the slower rate of 0.8 per cent.

Delving further, the researchers found that two-thirds of the deterioration between the first two periods could be explained by just three of manufacturing's eight sub-sectors. From worst to least worse: petrol and chemicals, food and beverages, and metal products.

Trouble is, they could find "no overarching systemic reason for the decline". That is, no problem or problems you could tell the government it needed to fix.

What they found were several factors that made the figures look bad but weren't actually bad themselves, plus one factor we all know about, can't do much about, but have reason to hope will improve soon: the high dollar.

The metal products industry's poor performance was explained mainly by a big expansion in alumina refining capacity which had yet to come on line. Obviously a temporary problem.

The petroleum and chemicals industry's poor performance was explained to a significant extent by increased investment by petroleum refineries to meet new environmental standards. That is, there was an improvement in the quality of their output which the figures didn't pick up.

The food and beverages industry's poor performance was partly explained by a change in consumer preferences in favour of products made in smaller-scale, more labour-intensive bakeries. No probs if that's what the punters want.

In both petroleum and chemicals and food and beverages the poor performance was explained also by reduced use of production capacity, caused largely by the effect of the high dollar in reducing exports and increasing competition from imports.

But now I must give you the product warning economists keep forgetting. Like so many other concepts in economics, multi-factor productivity is simple in principle but as ropey as hell in practice. Putting a number on the concept requires you to make a lot of unrealistic assumptions (perfect competition, equilibrium, for instance) and use statistics that don't accurately measure what they're supposed to measure.

As the researchers acknowledge, multi-factor productivity is measured as a residual: after you estimate the amount of production you subtract an estimate of the amount of labour used and an estimate of the amount of capital used (particularly dodgy) and what's left is multi-factor productivity.

It's what a modeller would call an "error term" - the net result of all the mismeasurement of output, labour input and capital input. So, as the researchers acknowledge, the figures they have used can't be taken as a reliable measure of technological progress.

My word for it is ragbag: technological progress may be in there somewhere, but so will be a lot of other things, real and non-existent.

You can work out the figures for multi-factor productivity, but if they look good you don't know whether they really are, nor why they are. If they look bad it's the same.

What the Productivity Commission's study tells me is that even with figures that look really bad, it can find nothing amiss. Worrying about measures of multi-factor productivity is jumping at shadows.

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Money can ease the pain of disability

Did you know there's an expensive policy proposal Tony Abbott isn't opposed to? When it lobbed last week both sides made supportive noises about it so, thanks to the perversity of politics, it slipped past without getting the attention it deserves. It's the Productivity Commission's draft report on the government's desire to establish a national disability insurance scheme.

The scheme would cover people with severe disabilities present at birth or acquired through an accident or health problem, but not due to ageing.

It's estimated that about 680,000 people under 65 suffer a severe or profound limitation in their ability to engage in core human activities. Just under half of these have at least a daily need for help with mobility, self-care or communicating with others. But only about 170,000 are using disability services.

Among those with a profound inability to engage in core activities, about 40 per cent suffer from mental and behavioural disorders such as autism, Asperger's syndrome and intellectual disability. The next biggest groups suffer from diseases of the nervous system, such as multiple sclerosis, of the circulatory, respiratory or digestive systems, and of the musculoskeletal system.

It's easy to look at that list and think none of it applies to me and mine, thank God. That's the political problem: it's not that we have no sympathy for these people, it's that we prefer not to think about such unpleasant topics. But all of us are just a car or household accident away from joining their number.

My interest in the topic comes via my belief that governments should be seeking to maximise our subjective wellbeing - our happiness - not just our material standard of living. One of the best ways to increase national happiness is to reduce the deep unhappiness suffered by many of the disabled and their carers.

People with disabilities are able to adjust to their circumstances and find happiness - but not if the community's neglect allows their lives to be a hellish struggle. The report quotes a psychiatrist saying members of the profession regularly meet parents considering murder-suicide because of their inability to find adequate help for their child.

The present system - or lack of system - for helping people with disabilities has many deficiencies. The most obvious is that in all states there are insufficient resources and gaps in services, so that people with disabilities and their family carers bear too much of the cost.

People with similar levels of impairment get quite different levels of support, depending on the state they live in, whether they live in the city or the country and even the origin of their disability.

The present arrangements are "provider-centric" - organised for the convenience of the providers of assistance - which reduces the ability of people with disabilities and their carers to choose which services they use.

Services are generally narrowly prescribed and don't have the goal of increasing the person's ability to take part in normal life. There are too few opportunities for people to work or participate in the community if they're able to.

People with disabilities and their families often don't have a reasonable level of certainty about the future. In particular, the parents of children with profound disability often worry about how their child will be supported when they get too tired or sick, or they die.

There's a lack of co-ordination between agencies, seen in duplicated and inconsistent methods for assessing people and allocating services, and inadequate links between services provided by different governments.

Services often aren't portable between states, penalising people who move. And there are other injustices and inefficiencies, such as caring for young people with disabilities in aged care homes and keeping people in hospitals - thus blocking beds - because of insufficient funds for minor modifications to their homes.

The report proposes a new national scheme providing insurance cover for all Australians in the event of a significant disability. The scheme would fund long-term, high-quality care and support (such as accommodation, mechanical aids, transport, respite, day programs and participation in the community), but would not overlap with Medicare, social security benefits or aged care arrangements.

Each individual's needs would be assessed and they would be provided with a "support package" portable across state borders. People with a package would be able to choose their own service providers, ask a non-government support organisation to assemble the best package on their behalf and even cash out their allocation of funds and direct them to areas of need they thought more important.

There would be a strong emphasis on helping people participate in education, training and employment where possible. People would be given more opportunity to choose mainstream services rather than those from specialist providers.

A separate national injury insurance scheme would be established for people requiring lifetime care and support for catastrophic injuries, such as major brain or spinal cord injuries. It would be a no-fault scheme and would catch people whose injuries were covered neither by worker's comp or compulsory third-party motor insurance.

The agency overseeing the two schemes would be created by, and report to, federal and state governments. It would have a high degree of protection from political interference. By "insurance" is meant social insurance - the risk of disability is removed from the individual and shared by the group which, because of its sheer size, is most able to bear it without great pain: all taxpayers.

At present, governments - mainly state governments - are spending about $6.2 billion a year. The report estimates the new schemes would cost as much again.

The extra $6.3 billion a year could be covered by increasing the present Medicare levy from 1.5 per cent to 2.3 per cent of income but, rather than start another "great big new tax on everything" outcry, the report recommends just funding it out of consolidated revenue, leaving the government to worry about how it will balance its budget. Funding problem safely swept under carpet.

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