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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 25. No. 13. 1962

N.Z. Bottom

N.Z. Bottom

A second factor is that we won't work our capital very hard. One of the background papers prepared for the Industrial Development Conference held in Wellington two years ago, compared total annual hours of work per head of the labour force for a considerable number of countries. No surprise to find New Zealand near the bottom of the list, with 1928 hours annually against approximately 2400, for example, in Switzerland, or 2310 in West Germany. Moreover, such a comparison conceals the fact that there is also much more shift working in many of the big industrial countries than is here, so that the number of hours annually for which machinery is worked would present an even greater contrast.

This is clearly one reason why a given quantity of capital investment in New Zealand tends not to generate so much additional output in a given period as it does elsewhere.

The third point worth notice is that because of the structure of its economy New Zealand has perhaps not enjoyed the benefits of technical progress to the same extent as more heavily industrialised countries. This may be an extremely important matter. One American economist, for example, has estimated that over the years 1909-1949, the increase in productivity in an important sector of the U.S. economy was brought about far more by improved technical methods than it was by an increase in the amount of capital per worker. In this respect it is not difficult to suppose that New Zealand may not have fared as well as some other countries: the types of economic activity in which the typical New Zealander engages — pastoral farming, light consumer goods industries, office work — are not fields in which the more spectacular advances have occurred.

It seems reasonable to hope that in regard to some of the explanations of our slow growth listed above, the near future may bring a change. Some of the new industries — the oil refinery, for example — will demand 24-hour working for purely technical reasons; and this may prove the thin end of the wedge in introducing shift-work more widely into the New Zealand industrial scene. Some of these industries, also, may prove more adept al attracting the gains accruing from technical progress than have those which have characterised our economy so far. As the large cohorts of post-war children reach the 15-plus age group, which they are now doing, the ratio of labour force to population — assuming we avoid substantial unemployment — should begin to rise again.

Against these favourable auspices we must set some less propitious omens.

Some of the new industries — the oil refinery again, for example, or the hydro-installation and bauxite-smelter in the South Island will demand huge inputs of capital to yield a given quantity of: output, though, once the capital investment has been made, they should go on yielding their output for a long time, and their output per man will be exceedingly high. Considerations such as these may largely cancel each other out, in which case the rate of growth of ' productivity, unless we do something to try to change it, may not be very different in the near future from what it has been in the recent past.

[unclear: O.P.S.]