Labour productivity is an important economic indicator (Getty Images)
When the Northern Ireland Executive was restored last year, the-then new Economy Minister Conor Murphy announced a new economic policy for Northern Ireland based on four pillars. Productivity was one of these pillars, but it has probably had the least publicity since the announcement of this new policy.
While this may be disappointing for economists, it isn’t really that surprising to anyone else. Productivity isn’t a concept that exactly gets a person’s pulse racing and, in many cases, it has a very negative connotation. This arises because, when we have talked about productivity in the past, we have been focused on the wrong objective. This is a problem, because we are going to need to talk about productivity quite a lot over the next number of years.