By international standards, New Zealand is a small town economy. True, Auckland now has more than 1.5 million people, but by global metrics this is not very large. In 2010 there were 449 cities with more than 1 million residents, and Auckland was ranked 307 in terms of population. Small beans indeed – even if Auckland is four times as large as the next two biggest cities in New Zealand.
So how does this small size influence outcomes for New Zealanders?
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In this post I am going to discuss how a change in labour force growth can explain firms’ entry/ exit rates. Recent findings by Hopenhayn et al (2018) for the US motivated me to think about this relationship in a NZ context.
Furthermore, the authors linked these entry and exit rates to “dynamism” and therefore productivity growth – a link I wanted to think about a bit more carefully.
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Economic growth is a much bemoaned topic, but what this tweet nicely illustrates is that the type of growth economists often talk about differs from the type of growth that concerns a number of people. Here we’ll briefly consider how we can understand this tweet.
Read moreAlthough GDP is a good measure of what it is supposed to measure, there are always questions about whether it is the right measure when asking a given policy question. This was the driving motivation behind the Living Standard’s Framework and the development of a suite of measures to inform our views on wellbeing, as I’ve previously written (with Anita King and Nairn MacGibbon).
The focus of this post is on digitization. In an era of digitization, economists have become more and more concerned about whether the conventional way of calculating GDP is appropriate for asking questions about changes in consumer welfare (surplus) through time.
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A new paper (PDF) claims that ageing populations will hinder growth by both dis-saving and dragging down innovation, thus reducing productivity. Using a VAR model, they relate the age structure to measures of growth, saving, investment, and other macroeconomic variables over the 1990-2007 period. They use those coefficients to predict the effect of demographic change on growth rates in the current decade. The results are dramatic, predicting that an ageing population will knock over a percentage point off some countries’ growth rates.
In a ray of light, this morning’s FT (£) reported a study of over 15,000 German employees that examined the relationship between ageing and productivity. One of the authors is quoted saying:
As workforces age, employers are concerned that productivity will decrease. That is not so. What matters is not chronological age but subjective age.
The research suggests that older people are systematically excluded from training activities, and are relegated to less creative and meaningful work, which renders them less productive. As the workforce ages, that may begin to change. As it changes, the relationship between growth and age structures is likely to weaken.
