Growth without an engine

Export-led growth is the right ambition, but the engine that will deliver it never gets built. Two new household surveys show why.

Figure 1 · Diverging bars

More people, not more output per person

Cumulative change FY21–FY25, per cent. The engine — output per worker — is running backwards.

The missing engine The saw-tooth

Growth has been here before — 5.8 per cent in FY21, 6.2 in FY22 — and both times it was gone within a year. The two charts above are the same story told twice: an expansion powered entirely by more people working, and what happens to expansions like that.