In this article, as part of the symposium on total factor productivity, Richard G. Lipsey of Simon Fraser University and Kenneth Carlaw of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand provide a trenchant critique of the concept of total factor productivity. They conclude that "the degree of...

The fourth issue of the International Productivity Monitor produced by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards contains five articles. Topics covered are: recent productivity developments in the United States and Canada and implications for the Canada-U.S. productivity and income gaps; the...

Major European countries, unlike the United States, did not experience an acceleration in labour productivity growth in the second half of the 1990s. In this article, Gilbert Cette from the Bank of France and the University of Aix-Marseilles II, Jacques Mairesse of INSEE-CREST, and Yusef Kocoglu...

This article, by Ian A. Stewart, is a review of the recently released Industry Canada research volume Productivity Issues in Canada, edited by Someshwar Rao and Andrew Sharpe. Stewart begins by noting that at over 900 pages and 25 papers the volume represents an important contribution to the...

This article by Edward N. Wolff of New York University examines trends in convergence in OECD countries toward U.S. productivity levels during the postwar period and finds strong evidence for this phenomenon up to 1990, with rapid growth in investment, education, and R&D in OECD countries...

In this paper we test the narrow Porter hypothesis on a sample of European economies in the period 1995-2008. We focus on the channels through which tighter environmental regulation affects productivity and innovation. Our findings suggest that the “narrow” Porter hypothesis cannot be...

The paper examines how Canadian manufacturing plants have responded to reductions in tariff barriers between Canada and the rest of world over the past two decades. Three main conclusions emerge from the analysis. First, trade liberalization was a significant factor behind the strong export...

In a recent paper, Bloom et al. (2020) find evidence for a substantial decline in research productivity in the U.S. economy during the last 40 years. In this paper, we replicate their findings for China and Germany, using detailed firm-level data spanning three decades. Our results indicate that...

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the Solow residual relates to innovation at the firm level. We estimate two kinds of relationships. The first relationship explains innovation output from innovation inputs. The second relationship relates TFP growth to innovation output. We obtain two...

Rapid technological progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has been predicted to lead to mass unemployment, rising inequality, and higher productivity growth through automation. In this paper we critically re-assess these predictions by (i) surveying the recent literature and (ii)...