Boosting productivity growth is necessary to raise living standards and well-being for all. Aggregate productivity has fallen, mainly driven by manufacturing, although service industries have also tended to underperform. Reviving productivity requires improving framework conditions further so...

I discuss reasons why manufacturing productivity statistics should be interpreted with caution in light of the recent growth of domestic and foreign outsourcing and offshoring. First, outsourcing and offshoring are poorly measured in U.S. statistics, and poor measurement may impart a significant...

Productivity statistics garner much attention because they are key indicators of economic progress. This paper reports on the average growth in provincial labour productivity from 1997 to 2005. It examines how medium-term differences in productivity growth have affected the relative levels of...

Average weekly working hours in most industrialized economies have displayed steady declines since the 1970s. Changes in working hours may have two contrasting effects on hourly productivity: a "fatigue effect" and a "learning effect." An increase in working hours may lead to the accumulation of...

Because of gaps in existing surveys and methodological problems with the computation of productivity measures, outsourcing and offshoring result in an overstatement of labor productivity and multifactor productivity growth in manufacturing. Although it is impossible to fully characterize the...

This paper asks how the performance of self-employed unincorporated businesses affects the size of the gap in labour productivity between Canada and the United States. To do so, the business sector in each country is divided into unincorporated and corporate businesses, and estimates of labour...

ICT capital is an important driver of productivity growth. Using data from the EUKLEMS growth accounts, we show that ICT has made smaller contributions to labour productivity growth in the EU-15 than in the US, both at the macro level and at the level of individual sectors. At the same time,...

This paper has three main objectives. First, it examines the level of multifactor productivity (MFP) in Canada relative to that of the United States for the 1994-to-2003 period. Second, it examines the relative importance of differences in capital intensity and MFP in accounting for the labour...

This paper compares long-run growth in labour productivity in Canada and the United States from 1961 to 2006. Over the entire period labour productivity in both countries grew at about the same rate. But Canadian growth exceeded that of the United States up to the early 1980s. Since then, U.S....