The world, of late, has seen a productivity slowdown. Many countries continue to recover from various shocks in the macro business environment, along with structural changes and inward looking policies. In contemporary times of growth slumps, various exits and protectionist regimes, this book engages with the study of productivity dynamics in the emerging and industrialized economies. The essays address the crucial aspects, such as the roles of human capital, investment accounting and datasets, that help understanding of productivity performance of global economy and its several regions. This book will be of interest to academics, practitioners and professionals in the field of economic growth, productivity and development studies. This will also be an important reference on empirical industrial economics in both India and the world.

Frequently, factors other than structural developments in technology and production efficiency drive changes in labor productivity in advanced and emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs). This paper uses a new method to extract technology shocks that excludes these influences, resulting in lasting improvements in labor productivity. The same methodology in turn is used to identify a stylized example of the effects of a demand shock on productivity. Technology innovations are accompanied by higher and more rapidly increasing rates of investment in EMDEs relative to advanced economies, suggesting that positive technological developments are often capital-embodied in the former economies. Employment falls in both advanced economies and EMDEs following positive technology developments, with the effect smaller but more persistent in EMDEs. Uncorrelated technological developments across economies suggest that global synchronization of labor productivity growth is due to cyclical (demand) influences. Demand drivers of labor productivity are found to have highly persistent effects in EMDEs and some advanced economies. Unlike technology shocks, however, demand shocks influence labor productivity only through the capital deepening channel, particularly in economies with low capacity for counter-cyclical fiscal policy. Overall, non-technological factors accounted for most of the fall in labor productivity growth during 2007-08 and around one-third of the longer-term productivity decline after the global financial crisis.

Labor productivity growth in the United States and other advanced countries has slowed dramatically since the mid-2000s, a major factor in their economic stagnation and political turmoil. Economists have been debating the causes of the slowdown and possible remedies for some years. Unaddressed in this discussion is what happens if the slowdown is not reversed. In this volume, a dozen renowned scholars analyze the impact of sustained lower productivity growth on public finances, social protection, trade, capital flows, wages, inequality, and, ultimately, politics in the advanced industrial world. They conclude that slow productivity growth could lead to unpredictable and possibly dangerous new problems, aggravating inequality and increasing concentration of market power. Facing Up to Low Productivity Growth also proposes ways that countries can cope with these consequences.

This book deals with the importance of industrialization and the development of manufacturing in the economic development process. It focuses specifically on new challenges such as global value chains, the rise of China, climate change, and the role of state versus private sector entrepreneurs in forging appropriate industrial policies.

Total factor productivity growth was stagnant or slowing in many advanced countries even prior to the crisis. This paper documents sector-level productivity patterns across advanced economies prior to the crisis and examines the role of product and labor market rigidities as well as innovation and investments in information technology and human capital in driving productivity differences across sectors and countries. Since productivity payoffs of reforms evolve over time, we also focus on large changes in the structural indicators examine their dynamic impact on productivity, employment, and output. Our results suggest that reform priorities depend on country-specific settings, including the scale of specific policy distortions and the distance from the technology frontier. Productivity gains from reforms are large and materialize predominantly in the medium term, with some important variations across industries and countries.

Development and the ending of mass poverty require a massive increase in productive capabilities and production in developing countries. Some countries, notably in Asia, are achieving this. Yet ‘pro-poor’ aid policies, especially for the least developed countries, operate largely without reference to policy thinking on the promotion of innovation for productivity growth. Conversely, policy-makers and researchers on innovation and industrial policies tend to know little about the potential for social protection to support innovation and productivity improvement. This book aims to focus attention on this gulf between research on innovation and on poverty reduction and to identify some of its policy consequences; to set out some ways in which this gulf can be bridged, analytically and empirically; and to contribute to the creation of an agenda for further research and an understanding of the urgency of the implied rethinking. The first two chapters provide sustained arguments for embedding social policy thinking in much more ‘productivist’ frameworks of thought that focus on raising productivity and employment; and for identifying growth theories that can incorporate satisfactory understandings of innovation and employment upgrading. A set of chapters then tackle these broad themes in the context of health, addressing the interlinked issues of innovation, health inequity and associated impoverishment. The final set of chapters examines the challenge of creating industrial policies that generate both innovation and employment, using and going beyond concepts of systems of innovation.

This volume uses the study of firm dynamics to investigate the factors preventing faster productivity growth in Latin America and the Caribbean, pushing past the limits of traditional macroeconomic analyses. Each chapter is dedicated to an examination of a different factor affecting firm productivity - innovation, ICT usage, on-the-job-training, firm age, access to credit, and international linkages - highlighting the differences in firm characteristics, behaviors, and strategies. By showcasing this remarkable heterogeneity, this collection challenges regional policymakers to look beyond one-size-fits-all solutions and create balanced policy mixes tailored to distinct firm needs. This book is open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO license.

Conference papers, comparison, economic growth, productivity trends, USA, developed countries - industrial investment, research and development, energy policy, education, labour relations, labour cost, tax, industrial growth, labour productivity. Bibliography, graphs, statistical tables.

Productivity has again moved to center stage in two critical academic and policy debates: the slowing of global growth amid spectacular technological advances, and developing countries’ frustratingly slow progress in catching up to the technological frontier. Productivity Revisited brings together the new conceptual advances of 'second-wave' productivity analysis that have revolutionized the study of productivity, calling much previous analysis into question while providing a new set of tools for approaching these debates. The book extends this analysis and, using unique data sets from multiple developing countries, grounds it in the developing-country context. It calls for rebalancing away from an exclusive focus on misallocation toward a greater focus on upgrading firms and facilitating the emergence of productive new establishments. Such an approach requires a supportive environment and various types of human capital--managerial, technical, and actuarial--necessary to cultivate new transformational firms. The book is the second volume of the World Bank Productivity Project, which seeks to bring frontier thinking on the measurement and determinants of productivity to global policy makers.