Dr. Philip Lowe’s latest plea after being sacked from the top G20 post in India
- Lowe urged Australia to boost productivity
- He made a statement at his last G20 meeting in India
- Lowe acting as RBA Governor until 17 September
In a world obsessed with inflation, the Reserve Bank (RBA) governor used his time at his last G20 meeting in India to plead for more to be done to boost productivity growth.
Mr Lowe’s plea comes just days after it was announced that he would not be reappointed to his post, but that Lieutenant Governor Michele Bullock would take his place in mid-September.
The end of his tenure comes after he came under heavy criticism for the RBA’s campaign to raise the cash rate in the last 12 months amid sky-high inflation, especially after Lowe said interest rates would stay at record lows until at least 2024.
Philip Lowe addressed the G20 for the last time as Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia.
Still serving as governor until September 17, Lowe urged world economic experts to consider the “bigger challenge” of low productivity growth amid the inflation crisis.
‘[Low productivity] it means less sustainable growth in real wages, it also means a limited increase in output,’ he said.
‘It means a slower expansion of the public services that we want for our society and it means a greater tension in the distribution of income.
“So low productivity growth means economic and social problems.”
Mr Lowe went on to say that there was hope for productivity, but for improvements to be made, ‘good ideas’ must find their way into the political system.
“If we don’t do that, then we are condemning our citizens to slower growth in real wages, smaller public services and greater stress on income distribution,” he said.
Joining Lowe at the G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors was Treasurer Jim Chalmers
Joining Lowe at the G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors was Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who also had productivity problems in his sights.
“We must also recognize that now is not the time to divert our attention from the defining challenge, which remains inflation, but now is the time to think about what kind of economies we want to build as we emerge from weakness and weak growth. of GDP over the course of the next 12 months or so,’ he said.
“That means we need to increasingly focus our coordinated efforts on how we make our economies much more productive, and that goes for some of the issues we need to address at this meeting: energy transformation, how we adapt and adopt technology, and how we get the piece of human capital right.’
