It is right to emphasise improvements in education and training and in the transport infrastructure. We need a higher level of investment on a sustained basis. If all this flows out of a government obsession with the productivity gap then no harm will have been done, and probably quite a lot of good. But if we are waiting for the gap to close, and measuring the progress in closing that gap every year, we will be disappointed. Not only are the statistics unsuitable for such fine-tuning but we are quite likely to find that, if accurate data is ever produced, there was not much of a gap to start with.
Productivity is a desirable end but a lousy target.
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