ABC.net
This week the federal government’s much-anticipated, and just as hyped, Economic Reform Roundtable has gotten underway. Central to the agenda is how to boost national productivity — which is, roughly speaking, a way of measuring the resources needed both to produce certain goods and to be able to afford to buy certain goods.
Put simply: greater efficiency leads to greater affordability and higher living standards. When the same amount of time, labour, investment and raw materials (‘inputs’) need to be expended in order to produce an even greater number of goods and services (‘outputs’), the inputs become more valuable even as the outputs become more affordable, leading to lower working hours and relatively higher standards of living.
By contrast, anything that impedes efficiency reduces productivity. Unsurprisingly, then, the need to reduce regulation emerged as a central theme in the lead-up to the productivity roundtable — whether that means reforming environmental laws that slow down the housing approval process or reducing constraints on the development and deployment of artificial intelligence.
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