Economy
Sustaining Tasmania’s economic renaissance
SAUL ESLAKE:
It’s not often that a finanical markets economist publicly advocates increased government spending but in this particular instance I’m happy to do so …
2004-05 was a very good year for the Tasmanian economy.
As measured by real gross State product (GSP) Tasmania’s economy grew by 4.0% in 2004-05 — a growth rate which has been exceeded only twice in the past decade and only five times in the past 27 years Over the past four years, Tasmania’s real GSP has grown at an average annual rate of 3.4%. That’s the best performance over any four year period since that ended 1988-89.
Incidentally, I acknowledge that the Tasmanian Treasury has many reservations about the ABS’ GSP estimates for Tasmania. However, since Treasury don’t publish details of, nor any history of, their ‘underlying economic activity’ measure — by contrast with the Queensland Treasury which publishes detailed estimates of State product, but it is all we have to go on.
It should actually be easier for Tasmania to produce accurate estimates of GSP than any other State since it’s presumably easier to measure intra-state trade between Tasmania and the mainland (given that none of it occurs by road or rail) than between any other State and the rest of Australia.
So I repeat the plea I made here last year for Treasury to be more transparent about its measure of ‘underlying economic activity’ — in particular by giving more detail about how it’s constructed, providing a time series of previous estimates.
This stuff shouldn’t be a state secret.