Microeconomic reform and productivity in Australia - boom or blip

Increased aggregate productivity growth in the 1990s has been taken to indicate support for the success of microeconomic reform policy in Australia. The Productivity Commission / Australian Bureau of Statistics key estimates of peak to peak market sector multifactor productivity growth since the mid 1960s are examined in this paper. The peak to peak market sector measures are compared with five year averages. Series are reconstructed for the whole economy, and simple regression estimates obtained. The findings lend support to a spike in the measure in the 1990s rather than sustained increase and highlight the sensitivity of the estimates to cyclical and unknown factors.