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Assessing Australia's productivity performance

Industry Commission research paper

This paper was released in September 1997.

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  • Contents

Preliminaries
Copyright, Foreword, Acknowledgements; Contents, Abbreviations, Key Points, Overview

1   About this paper
1.1   Focus of the paper
1.2   Structure of the paper

2   Productivity and living standards
2.1   What is productivity?
2.2   Why productivity is crucial to living standards
2.3   Broader perspective on living standards
2.4   Sources of productivity improvement
2.5 Summing up

3   Estimates of productivity’s contribution to output and living standards
3.1   Productivity’s contribution to output growth
3.2   Productivity’s contribution to living standards
3.3   Summing up

4   Australia’s historical performance
4.1   Interpreting productivity measures
4.2   Australia’s aggregate productivity indicators
4.3   Assessing productivity performance
4.4   Summing up

5   The sectoral foundations of aggregate productivity growth
5.1   Sectoral productivity indicators
5.2   Assessing sectoral productivity performance
5.3   Summing up

6   An international perspective
6.1   International trends in productivity growth
6.2   Australia’s comparative performance
6.3   Remaining productivity gaps
6.4   Summing up

7   Distributing the gains from productivity growth
7.1   How do we benefit from productivity improvements?
7.2   Australia’s experience
7.3   Flow-on effects
7.4   Summing up

8   Employment implications
8.1   Assessing employment consequences
8.2   Firm and industry-specific activity
8.3   Aggregate and sectoral employment effects
8.4   Issues for further research
8.5   Summing up

9   Directions for further work
9.1   Information base
9.2   Further research

Appendix A   Indicators of living standards in Australia over the twentieth century

Appendix B   Living standards, productivity and the labour force

Appendix C   Details on Australia’s sectoral productivity record

Appendix D   Details on international productivity

Appendix E   Details on distribution of gains

References

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