scholarly journals New Normal or Real-Time Noise? Revisiting the Recent Data on Labor Productivity

Author(s):  
Mark J. Bognanni ◽  
John Zito

Some economic observers have argued that the weakness of recent productivity data indicates we have entered a new era of low economic growth. To investigate that claim, we study labor productivity between 1968 and 2016 and compare recent productivity growth to its past behavior. We find that though recent productivity data are unambiguously weak, they are not greatly out of line with the variation of productivity over the historical record. We find that when labor productivity has been weak in the past, it did not persist at those levels. In addition, we find a systematic tendency to understate growth in real time, suggesting that the average rate of the past six years will likely be revised up in future.

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 590-616 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaomin Li ◽  
Seung Ho Park ◽  
David Duden Selover

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop the theoretical linkage between culture and economic growth and empirically test the relationship by measuring culture and how it affects labor productivity. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a cross-section study of developing countries and regresses economic productivity growth on a set of control variables and cultural factors. Findings It is found that three cultural factors, economic attitudes, political attitudes, and attitudes towards the family, affect economic productivity growth. Originality/value Many economists ignore culture as a factor in economic growth, either because they discount the value of culture or because they have no simple way to quantify culture, resulting in the role of culture being under-researched. The study is the first to extensively examine the role of culture in productivity growth using large-scale data sources. The authors show that culture plays an important role in productivity gains across countries, contributing to the study of the effects of culture on economic development, and that culture can be empirically measured and linked to an activity that directly affects the economic growth – labor productivity.


2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (Special Edition) ◽  
pp. 33-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rashid Amjad ◽  
Namra Awais

This paper reviews Pakistan’s productivity performance over the last 35 years (1980–2015) and identifies factors that help explain the declining trend in labor productivity and total factor productivity (TFP), both of which could have served as major drivers of productivity growth – as happened in East Asia and more recently in India. A key finding is that the maximum TFP gains and their contribution to economic growth are realized during periods of high-output growth. The lack of sustained growth and low and declining levels of investment appear to be the most important causes of the low contribution of TFP to productivity growth, which has now reached levels that should be of major concern to policymakers vis-à-vis Pakistan’s growth prospects.


1992 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Bradford De Long

Over the past century in six major economies, economic growth has been strongly associated with machinery investment, as is the case for a larger group of nations since 1950. Both macroeconomic patterns and narratives of the history of technology suggest that this association is causal—that a high rate of machinery investment appears to be a necessary prerequisite for rapid long-run growth—and points away from possibilities that rapid growth is the cause of high machinery investment or that a high rate of machinery investment is a good proxy for other factors that are important causes of growth.


2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-155
Author(s):  
Chih-Hai Yang ◽  
Chia-Hui Huang

Innovation is widely recognized as the main stimulus of economic growth. Considering that Taiwan has devoted increasingly more efforts to R&D since the late 1980s, a crucial question is posed: did the R&D productivity of firms begin to decline in Taiwan during the post-Asian Financial Crisis period when Taiwan's economic growth began to decelerate? This study investigates changes in R&D productivity for Taiwan's manufacturing firms from 1990 to 2003. By employing various approaches to obtain robust results, findings from firm-level microeconometric analysis suggests that overall R&D productivity in Taiwan appears to have been ascendant, particularly during the post-crisis period. This result is also evidenced by segmenting the sample into industry groups, whereby electronics firms have a significantly high R&D productivity growth relative to firms outside the electronics industry. Therefore, the slowdown of Taiwan's economic growth in the past decade is attributed to other influences rather than a slowdown in R&D productivity.


1998 ◽  
Vol 13 (0) ◽  
pp. 173-186
Author(s):  
Jeong Ho Lee

Although the Republic of Korea has recovered from the ruins of the 1950's Korean War and achieved a remarkable economic growth during the past 40 years, it is now, at the threshold of 21st century, faced with the great national economic crises which led us to receive the IMF's rescue fund. To make a long story short, I presume the cause of the economic tragedy mainly originated from the fact that the frame and habitude of our way of life were not so changed suitably as to accommodate the new era of unbounded international competition.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Riley

The Earth Summit (1992) heralded what was anticipated to be a new era in environmental regulation with the advent of sustainable development. The concept was based on integrating environmental protection with economic development, supported by specific objectives, such as protection of biodiversity and achievement of intergenerational equity. By the early part of the 21st-century it was apparent that sustainable development had become equated with continuous economic growth, human domination and commodification of nature. This article argues that shortcomings in sustainable development, apparent over the past 25 years, are partly due to the concept’s initial formulation and also attributable to the way the concept has been interpreted and implemented. This validates calls for reconfiguring society’s value systems by better integrating law and policy with Earth-centric principles. The discussion argues that this involves more than tinkering with the key tenets of sustainable development, instead of necessitating their reconceptualisation in accordance with philosophies of Earth jurisprudence.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernando Navajas ◽  
Hildegart Ahumada ◽  
Santos Espina-Mairal ◽  
Guillermo Bermúdez

This technical note examines the interactions between infrastructure and productivity growth in Mexico. To address this relation, we follow an approach that seek to tie down infrastructure productivity improvements in terms of the impact of particular types of infrastructure on particular sectors, thus providing the basis for informed decisions on investment priorities for economic growth. We have been able to identify significant relations between labor and capital productivity improvements, or capital deepening (i.e., investment) in infrastructure-related sectors and labor productivity improvements in other sectors. Sectoral infrastructure priorities can be found in the transport and energy sectors, broadly defined, with effects that have regional differences. The nature of our results points to complementary policies and the need to improve the regulatory compact for infrastructure in Mexico. Our results recommend special attention to the regulatory/competition policy approach in transport, and the electricity wholesale market.


Author(s):  
Stephen N. Broadberry ◽  
Claire Giordano ◽  
Francesco Zollino

Italy's economic growth over its 150 years of unified history did not occur at a steady pace, nor was it balanced across sectors. Relying on an entirely new input (labor and capital) database, this chapter evaluates the different labor productivity growth trends within the Italian economy's sectors, as well as the contribution of structural change to productivity growth. Italy's performance is then set in an international context: a comparison of sectoral labor productivity growth rates and levels within a selected sample of countries (United Kingdom, United States, Germany, Japan, India) allows us to better time, quantify, and gauge the causes of Italy's catching-up process and subsequent more recent slowdown. Finally, the paper analyzes the proximate sources of Italy's growth, relative to the other countries, in a standard growth accounting framework, in an attempt also to disentangle the contribution of both total factor productivity growth and capital deepening to the country's labor productivity dynamics.


2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 1850170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abraham Mulugetta ◽  
Yuko Mulugetta

This study examines labor and capital service inputs as well as multi-factor productivity growth in Japan and compares results to eight other industrial nations using OECD's productivity data from 1985 to 2007. The study reveals that since 1991 Japan's economic growth has been negatively measured by all three discriminant functions identified.


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