The Australian Productivity Commission has made some recommendations for a National Disability Insurance Scheme. The government is (probably) going to partially meet the funding requirements. This process is fairly typical. A government funded body makes recommendations to government who accept the recommendations in principle but fail to implement or fund them completely. I understand that
Imagine for a moment that you are in charge of the country. Your country needs you to increase its competitiveness… you know the best way to do this is to improve its productivity. Of course, what you might do will depend very much on the country you are in charge of … its current economy,
Sometimes we want output to go down .. sometimes we even want people doing as little work as possible. Think of maintenance engineers ... we want them efficiently and effectively involved in preventative maintenance. We want them sat down the rest of the time (if there is any 'rest of the time') .. we don't
Italy's productivity is on the decline. This is bad news for Italy and for the EU (and especially the Eurozone countries). Italy seems to have a whole bureaucracy of regulation that keeps Italian companies small ..... making it difficult to secure economies of scale ... and stops them doing lots of things that would improve
Food inflation combined with inadequate gains in productivity are clear indicators that our ability to feed a rapidly growing population is at serious risk without swift action. Example 1 Eggs are one of the most basic, affordable protein sources that people around the world depend upon. But, in recent years, production has been declining by
Governments (bless them!) often do things with good intentions.. but often fail to think through the unintended consequences of their actions. Take energy subsidies as an example. Quite a few governments subsidise energy prices ... to help businesses be more competitive, perhaps. However, business will only take a cold, hard look at energy usage when
I've talked in the past about the need to improve agricultural productivity to keep the world fed. This was brought home to me this week when I read an astonishing fact. (Assuming, of course, that this is true ... and I have no reason to doubt it.) "The world will need as much food in
At the recent Rio summit (the less than spectacular one) there was some discussion about whether GDP is the best measure of a nation's well-being ... in an age where we are increasingly looking at the negative impact (on the environment) of increased industrial activity. The World Confederation of Productivity Science has been looking at
You will recognise the 3 word in the title to this post as being .... well, what, exactly? related terms? or synonyms? If you do a search for these terms online, you can find lots of definitions and lots of ratios ... many go which are just plain wrong! In descriptive terms, efficiency is doing
It is almost important to run a high productivity company at the moment. The shadow hanging over Europe from the Euro crisis is sucking all the energy out of the European market ... and pulling other markets down with it. We know that we are already in a long-term difficult period ... if 'they' cannot