Light shone on Reserve Bank's gloomy economic outlook

The harsh reality behind Treasury’s rosy 40-year economic outlook

Treasury projects a wealthy future for Australia, but stagnant real incomes and a productivity slump reveal a far more fragile reality.

Light shone on Reserve Bank's gloomy economic outlook

Treasury's productivity assumption has been described as "unrealistically optimistic" but the Reserve Bank's might be too downbeat, an economist says.

Light shone on Reserve Bank’s gloomy economic outlook

The latest Intergenerational Report, the triennial roadmap of the Australian economy’s next 40 years, contains a stack of numbers. But one number came in for greater scrutiny than the others: 1.2 per cent. That’s Treasury’s assumption for how fast productivity will grow each year on average over the next four decades, on which almost every other economic figure in the report was based. While 1.2 per cent is not particularly strong compared to pr…