But that will change in about a month’s time when a Goods and Services Tax is introduced to replace the old wholesale sales tax and to take some of the weight off income taxes. The second point about productivity I want to make concerns the new economy/old economy divide.
Some people tend to judge a country’s technological sophistication by, for example, the number of listed companies in the IT sector. Although Australia has a number of companies that fit this description, about 70 or so in fact, their combined share of the stock market is not large by international standards. But that is only one measure of technological sophistication.