Catching Australia?

Matt Nolan writes over at the TVHE blog:

However, there is one place where I disagree with NRT AND John Key – “catching Australia” is a managerial consultants view of policy, and doesn’t make sense on either economic or social policy grounds. (Comments here, here, and here).

Matt makes a good point, there is little that the government can do to really help increase New Zealand's productivity. They can do bad things to slow down our already slow rate of productivity growth but the good things that a government can do have been done, that's what helped get us into the group of high income countries. I have made comments on this before here.