Recent attention has focused on the UK's productivity gap in the retail sector. Figure 1 shows an estimate of labour productivity in retail across countries, using output per hour worked. The UK lies well behind the US, France and Germany. Reynolds at al (2005) contribute to this debate by...

Why have some countries done so much better than others over the recent past? In order to shed new light on this issue, this paper provides a decomposition of the change in the distribution of output-per-worker across countries over the period 1960-98. The main finding of the paper is that most...

We analyse the consequences of starting a wage subsidised job, marginal employment, for unemployed workers. Marginal employment is a type of wage subsidy paid to unemployed workers and they do not lose their unemployment benefits if the wage is below a certain threshold. We ask if the unemployed...

This paper investigates whether failure in innovation at the firm level can account for cross-country heterogeneity in manufacturing productivity growth. There is no strong evidence in the literature on the existence of such link. Our work, however, differs in a number of ways from much of the...

This paper seeks to identify relationships between human capital and cultural capital, in the context of local labour market productivity. The key constituents of human capital, identified in the literature, are jointly examined in a close-to-reality-model. The main advantage of our model of...

This paper provides a description and a discussion of some important aspects relating to recent productivity developments in the euro area. Following decades of stronger gains in the euro area than in the US, labour productivity growth has fallen behind that in the US in recent years. This...

Das deutsche Verarbeitende Gewerbe hat nach Norwegen das zweithöchste Lohnstückkostenniveau der Industrieländer zu verkraften. Wichtige Konkurrenzländer der Bundesrepublik wie die USA, Japan, Frankreich, Italien und die Niederlande haben einen Stückkostenvorteil von bis zu 25 Prozent. Diese...

Das deutsche Verarbeitende Gewerbe hat verglichen mit zwölf bedeutenden Industrieländern das höchste Lohnstückkostenniveau zu verkraften. Wichtige Konkurrenzländer der Bundesrepublik wie die USA, Japan, Frankreich, Italien und die Niederlande haben einen Stückkostenvorteil von bis zu 27...

Das deutsche Verarbeitende Gewerbe hat im Vergleich mit 14 Industrieländern etwa gleichauf mit Dänemark und dem Vereinigten Königreich das höchste Lohnstückkostenniveau. Wichtige Konkurrenzländer wie Japan, die USA und Frankreich haben einen Lohnstückkostenvorteil von bis zu 27 Prozent....

Understanding productivity performance is important to informing policy advice on how to improve productivity and therefore New Zealand's overall economic performance. Given data limitations inherent in international productivity comparisons, this paper is not intended to inform policy in...