Is there a defintion for productivity. The Bureau of Census defines it as output per hour, hourly compensation and unit labor cost. Re: output per hour, how is output denominated? Monetary value?
Henry
Doug Henwood wrote:
> Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
>
> >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