New Zealand's Economic Growth
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Galt, David Working Paper New Zealand's Economic Growth New Zealand Treasury Working Paper, No. 00/09 Provided in Cooperation with: The Treasury, New Zealand Government Suggested Citation: Galt, David (2000) : New Zealand's Economic Growth, New Zealand Treasury Working Paper, No. 00/09, New Zealand Government, The Treasury, Wellington This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/205424 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ www.econstor.eu TREASURY WORKING PAPER 00/09 New Zealand’s Economic Growth David Galt ABSTRACT This paper forms part of the Treasury’s ongoing work programme investigating New Zealand’s economic performance. It represents one approach to understanding New Zealand’s economic performance, that of reviewing theoretical and empirical literature on economic growth. Other research approaches the Treasury is adopting to shed light on these issues include: monitoring New Zealand’s total factor productivity performance; learning from overseas experience; and reviewing linkages between specific policy issues and economic growth. The paper seeks to provide a synthesis of recent thinking about New Zealand’s economic growth performance by reviewing international growth literature, and the views of commentators analysing New Zealand’s economic performance. The synthesis suggests that there are no obvious policy options that will dramatically improve New Zealand’s growth performance, and this is consistent with international findings on the growth experience of industrialised economies. Growth is influenced by much more than Government policy, even if well formulated. Current policy settings seem broadly consistent with the literature’s general conclusions on requirements for growth. An important conclusion is that there are many potential contributors to growth. Typically, a small proportion of firms and industries contribute disproportionately to growth. The contribution of individual firms and sectors can change quite rapidly. Policy formation needs to take such a vision into account. I wish to thank many people whose discussions have contributed to this work. In particular, I wish to thank those who have commented on earlier drafts and especially Sarah Box, Andrew Coleman, Ron Crawford, Lesley Haines, Carl Hansen, Dean Hyslop, John Janssen, Benedikte Jensen, Renee Lister, Andrew Sweet, and John Yeabsley. Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the New Zealand Treasury. The Treasury takes no responsibility for any errors or omissions in, or for the correctness of, the information contained in these working papers. 2 Table of Contents Page Executive Summary................................................................................................................ 6 Purpose of this paper...........................................................................................................................7 Findings from International Growth Literature...................................................................................7 New Zealand’s Growth Performance..................................................................................................8 Reasons for Moderate Post Reform Performance and Major Policy Points .......................................9 General Conclusions.........................................................................................................................12 1. Introduction and Conclusions..................................................................................... 14 Purpose .............................................................................................................................................14 Motivation.........................................................................................................................................14 Methodology.....................................................................................................................................15 2 Definitions.....................................................................................................................19 Welfare .............................................................................................................................................19 Economic Growth.............................................................................................................................20 National Income Measures ...............................................................................................................22 Technology .......................................................................................................................................23 Productivity.......................................................................................................................................23 3 Theoretical Frameworks and International Empirical Work ................................. 25 Neoclassical Model...........................................................................................................................25 Endogenous Growth Models.............................................................................................................27 Other Models and Theories...............................................................................................................29 Institutional Approaches...................................................................................................................29 Trade.................................................................................................................................................31 Disequilibrium Phenomena...............................................................................................................31 Geographical Factors ........................................................................................................................31 Innovation.........................................................................................................................................32 Summary of Theoretical Contributions.............................................................................................33 Empirical Work ................................................................................................................................33 Barro .................................................................................................................................................34 Critiques............................................................................................................................................35 Summaries of Empirical Work .........................................................................................................38 Conclusions about Empirical Work..................................................................................................40 4. New Zealand’s Performance and Explanations for it............................................... 42 4.1 Recent Trends in New Zealand’s GDP .................................................................. 42 4.2 Comparisons with OECD Performance ................................................................ 43 4.3 Output, Productivity and Factor Contributions................................................... 43 Productivity Results..........................................................................................................................45 4.4 Sectoral Performance .............................................................................................. 45 4.5 Performance Projections......................................................................................... 47 4.6 Microeconomic Indicators ...................................................................................... 48 4.7 Conclusions on New Zealand’s Performance........................................................ 50 4.8 Analysts’ Views ........................................................................................................ 51 5 Reasons for New Zealand’s Moderate Growth Performance .................................. 52 5.1 The Post-1945 Legacy.............................................................................................. 52 5.2 Geographical Position