New Zealand labor productivity edges up

New Zealand's labor productivity rose by 1.4 percent in the year to the end of March, the government statistics agency said Tuesday.

The increase was the result of stronger growth in outputs, which were up 2.5 percent, than in labor inputs, up 1.2 percent, according to Statistics New Zealand.

"The construction industry had high growth in output of 10.8 percent in the March 2013 year," national accounts manager Gary Dunnet said in a statement.

"This increase in output resulted from strong increases in the contributions of labor input and multifactor productivity."

Multifactor productivity captured the effects of unobserved inputs such as technological progress, efficiency gains and economies of scale.

Labor productivity, the measure of the quantity of goods and services (output) produced for each hour of labor, was up 100 units of output per hour of labor in 1996 to 132 units in 2014.

From 1996 to 2014, multifactor productivity was up 0.7 percent a year in New Zealand compared with 0.6 percent in Australia, although average growth in labor productivity in Australia -- at 2. 3 percent -- was higher than New Zealand's 1.5 percent. Endit