Under discretionary caps and PAYGO, individual representatives could choose to forgo their special projects, secure in the knowledge that others would not gain an advantage as a result. As already noted, an advantage of the budget rules was that they aimed at constraining the things that the Congress could control directly rather than targeting the overall level of the deficit.
1/5  Returning to the narrower data based on the enterprise surveys, it is estimated that labour productivity rose by 2,6 per cent in the year to the first quarter of 2005. Workers engaged in more strike action in the recent past: Man-days lost to industrial action increased more than three-fold from the first half of 2004 to the first half of 2005.