Long-term international GDP projections

Working Paper 2013-02

This paper develops a framework for projecting the GDP growth of Australia’s trading partners from 2012 to 2050. The framework draws heavily on the existing conditional growth literature, including long-standing estimates of key convergence parameters. It adds to the large amount of research in this area by providing estimates of the level of long-run relative productivity for 155 countries. We use a novel non-parametric approach that combines the World Economic Forum’s ordinal measure of long-run relative productivity (the ‘Global Competiveness Index’) and actual observed productivity to produce a cardinal measure of long-run relative productivity.