Many papers have documented wide variations in productivity even in narrowly defined industries. Some have argued that this primarily reflects measurement problems due to, for example, comparing across different products. Others argue this reflects persistent differences in performance due, for...

The UK’s poor productivity performance relative to the US has been a focus for government policy and analysis in recent Budgets and Pre-Budget Reports. Figure 1, where the UK business sector is scaled to 100, shows that US business sector labour productivity (value-added per worker) was just...