Productivity is the ultimate driver of sustainable increases in living standards. While Ireland is a high productivity country, it has not been immune from the global productivity slowdown, with the pace of growth on a downward trend throughout the 2000s. Little research has been carried out as...

In this report we review the literature on the relationship between ICT and productivity. In Sect. 1 we discuss in broad terms the theoretical relationship between ICT and productivity, while in Sect. 2 we present the growth accounting methodology, which tries to measure the contributions to...

Based on the expectation that the intensified use of robots contributes to the growth of labour productivity, this paper presents estimates of Cobb-Douglas production functions, using data for 12 EU countries and 9 manufacturing industries. The empirical results for the models pooling all...

In the euro area, there is mixed evidence that the GDP per capita of lower-income economies has been catching up with that of higher-income economies since the start of monetary union. The significant real convergence performance of some of the most recent members contrasts with that of the...

This paper investigates capital formation with a view at various tangible and intangible assets across Europe. Using novel datasets both at macro and firm level, we estimate translog production functions to assess complementarities at different aggregation levels. At macro-level, our evidence...

The diversity of technological activities that contribute to growth in labour productivity is examined in this paper for manufacturing and services industries in eight major EU countries. We test the relevance of the two major strategies of technological competitiveness (based on innovation in...