>While the lower unemployment rate and the greater proportion of the working
>age population employed in the US than in Europe is well recognized, Martin
>Wolf noted in yesterday's Financial Times that total factor productivity in
>the 1990s has also risen faster in the US at 1.1% year, than in the Euro
>zone, at .7% per cent.
There's a lot of mysticism involved in computing TFP, including the highly mystical concept of capital productivity, which depends in part on how you define and measure a unit of capital.
On the simpler, but by no means simple, indicator of labor productivity (what's the output of an hour's labor by a bond analyst? a janitor?) the IMF reports this:
MANUFACTURING PRODUCTIVITY average annual growth
1980s 1990s Canada 2.5% 1.9% France 3.9% 3.8% Germany 2.9% 4.7% Italy 3.9% 2.8% Japan 2.9% 1.3% UK 5.6% 2.5% US 2.7% 3.5%
EU 3.9% 3.4% Asian NIEs 8.0% 4.9%
The IMF's figures differ from what the BLS reports both for the U.S. and internationally, but no one at either place was able to explain to me why.
Doug