Privatisation and economic growth: the shorthand of a long process

The macroeconomic impact of privatisation on growth in Australia is investigated in a growth accounting framework. Separate measures of public and private capital are computed in order to estimate their impacts together with labour on GDP growth for the period 1960-2003. Previous empirical aggregate studies are relatively few. A simple growth rates version is found preferred by stationarity and other tests. Growth of labour input appears to have a strongly positive effect on the growth of GDP. In contrast, growth of public capital has no statistically significant effect on GDP growth, nor on private capital productivity. The data are consistent with the hypothesis that the coefficients of the growth equation are the same before and during privatisation.