This work was supported by The National Science Foundation project “Internationally Comparable Science, Technology, and Competitiveness Indicators” (SRS00-99594) and the International Economic program of The Conference Board. Inklaar, McGuckin and van Ark are with The Conference Board and...

Prior to the second half of the twentieth century, the economy of the United States was distinguished by cyclical instability and low growth; however, since the end of WWII, business cycles have moderated, coupled with relatively higher economic growth. Characteristically, in the second half of...

China has exhibited very rapid measured aggregate productivity growth. At the same time, the structure of its markets and the structure of businesses have been changing at an equally rapid rate. In this paper, we measure the extent of restructuring and the reallocation of resources (including...

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Symposium on Productivity, Competitiveness and Globalisation at Banque de France on 4 November 2005. The present paper is updated and extended. The paper makes use of earlier work, including Van Ark (2005), O’Mahony and Van...

This article is based on a study by Bart van Ark, Robert Inklaar and Robert H. McGuckin (2002a), "Changing Gear: Productivity, ICT and Service: Europe and the United States," Research Memorandum GD60, Groningen Growth and Development Centre (downloadable from http://www.eco.rug.nl/ggdc).

An earlier version of this paper was presented at a seminar on "Measurement of capital: beyond the traditional measures" at Conference of European Statisticians, 12 June 2007, Geneva; and at a conference on “Productivity and Innovation” organized by Statistics Sweden, October 24–25 2007,...

In this paper we analyse labour productivity growth in 51 industries in European countries and the United States. Using shift-share techniques we identify the industries in which the U.S. is leading most strongly. With a detailed decomposition analysis we identify whether the sources of the U.S....

This paper examines the empirical implications of aggregation bias when measuring the productive impact of computers. To isolate two specific aggregation problems relating to "aggregation in variables" and "aggregation in relations," we compare various production function estimates across a...

In recent years, U.S. productivity growth accelerated sharply in manufacturing, but has remained sluggish in the most computer-intensive service industries. This paper explores the possibility that information technology is generating output that is increasingly hard to measure in...