Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

There are many different productivity measures for different purposes and policy makers and other users are not always aware of the conceptual and empirical reasons for differences between them. Productivity is a key indicator in the assessment of economic performance and a growing number of statistical offices in the OECD area have recently become engaged in the measurement of productivity. This work is raising many new questions for measurement, including the possible approaches to developing measures of aggregate productivity performance, as well as issues related to productivity measurement in specific sectors of the economy. Some of these measurement issues, especially those related to the measure of capital services, have been taking into account in the current process of revision of the System of National Accounts (SNA).

Productivity measurement and analysis are the main topics addressed in this book, which is the result of the contributions presented and discussed in two international workshops organized by the Statistics Directorate and the Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry of the OECD. The first workshop was organized jointly by the OECD and Fundaccion BBVA and Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Economicas (IVIE) and held in Madrid in October 2005. The second workshop was organized jointly by the OECD and the Swiss Federal Statistical Office and the State Secretary for Economic Affairs of Switzerland and held in Bern in October 2006. The two workshops brought together about seventy representatives of statistical offices, central banks and other branches of government in OECD countries that are engaged in the analysis and the measurement of productivity developments at aggregate and industry levels.

In the following pages, we overview twenty three studies that all provide a different perspective on productivity measurement and/or analysis around five topics. The present volume is organised as follows. It starts out with conclusions and future directions from the Bern workshop presented by Erwin Diewert (University of British Columbia, Canada).

The first Part provides an overview of productivity growth and innovation illustrated by an analysis for Spain and Switzerland. The first measurement issue addressed in the book, notably in Parts two and three, concerns the measure of labour input. Despite significant progress and effort in this area, the measurement of hours actually worked still suffers from a number of statistical problems. In particular, different concepts and basic statistical sources used in different countries leave open many questions of international comparability, as described in Part two. Furthermore, labour input contributions to economic growth may be underestimated when labour input measures do not take into account changes in labour composition over time. Part three presents different labour input measures adjusted for changes in skills, educational attainment and labour market experience. The results underline the influence of changes in human capital on the contribution of labour input to economic growth. The fourth Part deals with different perspectives on capital input measurement and Part five presents a selection of country experiences in the measurement of industry-level multi-factor productivity.