I’m out of my base right now, but you can have a look at the Annual Reports around 1989-1992 and there are frequent references to Australia’s ‘competitiveness’. I can find the reports of inquiries on the PC site, but not the annual reports – though they may be there.

From my hard disc here is something Steve Dowrick wrote at around the same time on a related theme of international comparisons.

[T]he IC cite figures that purport to show that over the 1980s, Australia’s GNP per capita grew at an annual rate of some six percentage points below the performance of ‘the dynamic Asian economics to our north. . . In particular, they suggest that the standard of living in Japan, measured in US dollars, was the same as Australia’s in 1980 and was some 66 per cent higher by 1989. . . . These IC comparisons perpetrate one of the most basic mistakes that can be made in the field of international economic comparisons, namely an assumption that exchange rates between currencies reflect purchasing-power parities.

In King, S. and Lloyd. P, Economic Rationalism, Allen and Unwin, 1993

Really? Can you point some of them out. I also thought the IC was pretty sceptical of all this stuff, and simply mentioned it – to demonstrate that it was aware of it – without ever given it any credence.

You have x million people and they like to have nice headgear and other things. When they want to upgrade their headgear they need foreign exchange. How do they get it? Well they could go to the trouble of producing some high skill product – say bionic ears. They would then need to employ a lot of skilled people, have expertise in managing them and financing their projects. And they’d have to risk the possibility that the Australian and US competitors would end up producing a superior product ‘leapfrogging’ their own technology.

At this point the idea of a post hole digger would be hard to get out of the average Kuwaiti mind. People would just be saying – they might even write into the local paper – ‘why don’t we just get more post hole diggers’ and then we can upgrade our headgear.

Of course Kuwatis might well find fancy ways of adding value to oil or its discovery. They might pioneer some innovation in post hole diggers. But they’d have to pay people a fair bit to pioneer it, and they’d all be thinking of how much money they could make with existing post hole diggers. So even the post hole diggers might get improved elsewhere.

I just don’t see how having a competive wool export industry can, for example, reduce a country’s ability to design and manufacture aeroplanes.

And are you really Evan Thornley?