Ahead of the GDP figures to be released next week the news on the economy continues to be weak. This is not good news, given the OECD released a report into household disposable income which confirms that Australian living standards have flatlined for over five years at a time when other nations have seen their household incomes improve strongly. It shows that all the good work done during the GFC has been completely wasted.

The March quarter GDP figures were pretty dire – the worst annual growth for a decade, the first time since 1983 that GDP per capita had fallen in three consecutive quarters. One reason for that weak performance was the slowdown in construction work, which unfortunately shows no sign of abating.

If not recession for Australia, certainly a turn for the worse | Greg Jericho Read more

The latest construction work figures, released on Wednesday by the Bureau of Statistics, show that the volume of both private and public construction has now fallen for four straight quarters:

Private sector construction is down 8% on where it was a year ago, and public sector work is down 14%.

So while we still have to wait for the trade figures, and other data such as capital expenditure, to get a fuller picture of what the GDP figures will show, the signs are not great that the second quarter of this year saw much improvement.

Raising Australia's refugee intake would boost economy by billions, Oxfam says Read more

And that is a problem because, as I have been noting for some time, real household disposable income per capita has been either flat or falling for around seven years now.

While the ABS measures “real net national disposable income per capita” it does not actually provide a measure for household disposable incomes. This has meant the national income figure, which is commonly suggested as being a good measure of economic health or even living standards, gets prominence while the household income figure does not.

The problem with this is that good profit figures can obscure the fact that households are not doing any better.

But with a bit of work with the data you can calculate a figure for household disposable incomes, which has shown that for a long time now, the real growth in national income is to companies, not to households.

And so it was with interest that I read the release on Tuesday by the OECD which was headlined “OECD household income growth continued to outpace GDP growth in first quarter of 2019”.

The report noted that real household income per capita, “which provides a better picture of changes in households’ economic wellbeing than real GDP growth per capita” had “accelerated to 0.6% in the OECD area in the first quarter of 2019, compared with 0.3% in the fourth quarter of 2018.”

So good news!

And then you look at Australia’s figures.

The OECD estimates our real household disposable income fell 0.1% in the first quarter of this year and is down 0.8% on where it was last year.

The data highlights just how quickly we have fallen back to the field.

Whereas from 2007 to the end of 2013 the real disposable income of Australian households outgrew the OECD average in 18 out of 27 quarters (ie two thirds of the time), since then in just five out of 22 quarters we have done so.

Since the start of 2014, the annual growth of Australian real household disposable income has always been lower than the OECD average.

That’s five and a half years of underperformance:

The faltering of our living standards compared with the rest of the OECD is made clear when we look at the growth since 2007.

You can see that we soared through the GFC compared with everyone else, and yet we have utterly failed to take advantage, and now over the past 12 years the OECD has on average seen household incomes grow by more than ours:

What an utter waste.

All of the good work avoiding recession wasted through blowing the recovery.

And until wages growth improves we are unlikely to see any reversing of the situation. But what the data also highlights is that Australia has a uniquely bad issue with underemployment – the very thing that is a main driver of our weak wages growth.

Sign up to receive the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning

While the OECD uses a broader measure of underemployment than does the ABS (including marginally attached workers – those outside the labour force but who would be willing to work if something became available), the rise and fall of the two measures are largely comparable.

And what we see is that while our level of unemployment is slightly below the OECD average, our level of underemployment is the highest among advanced economies:

Most importantly for our flat household income growth over the past six years, while we have often had higher levels of underemployment compared with other OECD nations, there has been a significant widening of the gap since 2013:

A common suggestion when looking at our economy is that we are facing similar problems to those overseas. And while there is a lot of convergence, it is clear that Australian households have had a uniquely poor past five to six years.

The excellent work through the GFC has been completely undermined, and we now look back on a decade where, despite not having experienced anywhere near the pain of the Great Recession that occurred in the northern hemisphere, we cannot claim to be any better off compared with others because of it.

• Greg Jericho writes on economics for Guardian Australia