The financial services industry is the second-most productive industry in Australia, analysis by the Grattan Institute suggests. The institute puts the gross value added per hour worked in financial and insurance services at around A$170, or roughly three times the average gross value added per hour worked for all industries in Australia. Only mining, with a gross value added per hour worked of around $290, was more productive than financial services according to the Grattan analysis. In a report published yesterday the institute said the productivity data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics does not allow analysts to compare the level of productivity in different industries in any one period, or to derive estimates of productivity across a group of industries. The researchers nevertheless had a shot at working this out by deriving estimates of actual hours worked by industry and averaging these for each financial year. Saul Eslake, program director for productivity growth, and Marcus Walsh, research fellow, undertook the work for the Grattan Institute. Eslake worked for many years as chief economist at the ANZ. The context was an effort to delve into the alarm, on the part of the report's authors, at the "dramatic deterioration in Australia's productivity performance over the past decade, with the broadest measure of productivity growth actually having turned negative over the past five years." Eslake and Walsh wrote in the overview to their report that, "contrary to the view widely held in 'official' circles, the slowdown in Australia's productivity growth rate cannot be largely attributable to sharp declines in the level of productivity in the mining and utilities sectors." They blame the slowdown on the fading of effects of previous reforms; the lack of any new productivity-enhancing reforms since 2000; the increase in productivity-stifling regulation and legislation over the last 10 years, and capacity constraints as the Australian economy approached full employment.