Westpac's Luci Ellis calls on business to play its part in tackling the productivity problem
Might the solution to productivity woes lay not with the government but with business leaders themselves?
Westpac chief economist Luci Ellis thinks the discussion about one of Australia's biggest economic issues, productivity, is wrong-footed.
The former RBA assistant governor wants businesses to get on with improving productivity themselves, rather than waiting for the government to tinker with policy. And she wants a reconsideration of closely held nostalgia for the Hawke-Keating era.
“The productivity discourse has become mostly about what public policy can do,” Ellis tells Capital Brief. “The discourse is quite clearly unhelpful for creating a sense that it’s up to businesses to change business processes.”
In her view, one of the problems is that too often local experts fail to recognise or remember that the slowdown in trend productivity growth since the global financial crisis has been relatively common across Western countries.
