This doesn't help

The OECD came out the other day with its latest PISA results - "the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) examines what students know in reading, mathematics and science, and what they can do with what they know. It provides the most comprehensive and rigorous international assessment of student learning outcomes to date". Here's how New Zealand students have been doing over the history of the PISA tests. We used to be clearly better than the OECD average across reading, maths and science, but the results have been deteriorating in all three areas.

We're not alone in this. Here are Australia's PISA results. Almost exactly the same.

You could, I suppose, take some comfort from the fact that our performance levels (even if steadily declining) are still not that shabby by international standards. Here are the top 30 countries (I'm using countries loosely here to include for example the consolidated results from four regions in China producing quality-meeting PISA scores), when ranked by reading scores. We're still 12th, Australia's 16th. But self-evidently we'll get eaten if, for example, the rapidly developing economies of eastern Europe up their game and we continue to slide.

I'll leave the bunfight over the reasons for our (and Australia's) recent PISA declines to others. What bothers me about these trends is the contribution they may be making to our long-standing productivity problems, where for any given degree of effort and resources we seem to produce less than the higher-income OECD countries. Australia's also hit a productivity wall: its latest official estimates showed that "market sector multifactor productivity (MFP) fell 0.4% in 2018–19, the first decline since 2010–11 ... Labour productivity fell 0.2% in 2018–19, the first recorded negative for the sixteen industry market sector aggregate (since the beginning of the time series in 1994–95)".

A wee while back I wrote a column for the Australia and New Zealand accountants' magazine Acuity, documenting New Zealand's and Australia's productivity problems and canvassing some of the usual suspects ('Is there any scope for multifactor productivity growth?'). I didn't include falling skill levels for new entrants to the workforce - a fall of some 4.7% across all three areas since 2000 - but maybe I should have. Normally you'd expect each entrant cohort to the labour force to be bringing higher, not lower, levels of skills to the productivity party: it gets a lot harder to make progress when your starting point is going backwards. In the context of productivity growth, where small changes matter a lot over the longer term, a drop in entrant skills of approaching 5% in two decades is a big thing. This is a ball and chain we don't need.