The second line shows how the amount of output produced per hour worked has increased over this same period (the blue line) – this is the conventional measure of labour productivity growth. Graph 1  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  There are two main observations that I would like to make based on this graph.
The first is that over the past two decades we have seen unusually strong growth in the average real income generated by each hour of work in Australia. Since 1993, our effective purchasing power for each hour of work has increased by a cumulative 55 per cent, or around 2¼ per cent per year on average.