Commentary This is not a good time to be treasurer. Productivity in Australia has recorded its largest recorded quarterly drop ever; total GDP growth was positive but anaemic while GDP per capita went backwards, and interest rates, wages, and housing are all simultaneously rising. Not that Treasurer Jim Chalmers bears all the blame. Prime Minister…

Commentary It’s payback time. The Community Public Sector Union (CPSU), having helped bankroll Labor’s victory by donating its members’ funds to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, appears to be now expecting a quid pro quo from Labor for its members by the use of taxpayer funds. This is evident from the public…

Commentary There is more care than productivity in this budget. Literally, ‘care’ is one of the most frequently used words in the budget, with 20 mentions, while “productivity” has just four. Yet, if we are to pull ourselves out of the hole we have dug ourselves into, increasing productivity is the most important thing. Word…

Commentary “There is no such thing as a free lunch” is an almost iconic popular phrase. I am reminded of this when reflecting on the current trend in many countries to introduce the four-day working week. For example, on Nov. 21, 2022, Belgium implemented a law that enables willing employees to transition to a four-day…

Commentary For reasons I cannot explain, there was widespread shock at the new GDP numbers for the first quarter. They revealed a 1.1 percent growth rate, which is a crawl and much lower than the experts anticipated. And the new data points to an inexorable reality. Certainly the recession will be obvious by the summer…

Commentary The latest five-year review by the Australian Productivity Commission (PC) is a historically weak piece of analysis compared to previous reports, perhaps as a result of government pressure. If you read between the lines on Treasurer Jim Chalmers’s recent comments, it appears the Commission is to sing its swan song sooner rather than later….

Commentary There is no such thing as a free lunch. So goes the saying. Someone always has to pay. The question is only—who and when? This is a truism based on our experience as a society over millennia of generations. Similarly, there is no such thing as a four-day week with no diminution in income…

Australians will need to improve productivity levels if better standards of living are to be achieved, says Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers. The Labor treasurer predicts Australians will work two extra hours in the future while earning 40 percent less if the country fails to lift its game. In a speech to the Committee for Economic…

WASHINGTON—U.S. labor costs grew faster than initially thought in the fourth quarter, though the pace has slowed from the prior quarters. Unit labor costs—the price of labor per single unit of output—accelerated at a 3.2 percent annualized rate last quarter, the Labor Department said on Thursday. That was revised up from the 1.1 percent pace…

Some of the best-selling books over the past few decades fall under the broad topic of productivity advice. The popularity of titles such as “Atomic Habits,” “Getting Things Done,” and “Deep Work” suggests that many people have a strong desire to figure out how to organize their lives and be productive through set daily habits….