Purchasing power parities (PPPs) for R&D expenditure in 19 manufacturing industries are developed for France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom relative to the United States for the years 1997 and 1987. These PPPs are based on R&D input prices for specific cost categories...

We document dramatic rising wages in China for the period 1978–2007 based on multiple sources of aggregate statistics. Although real wages increased seven-fold during the period, growth was uneven across ownership types, industries and regions. In the last decade, the wages of state-owned...

This paper outlines the changes in the demographics and business environment in the U.S. that are increasing the demand for more skilled, higher educated workers. The literature around the returns to education is then reviewed, looking specifically for evidence of returns to businesses from...

This paper focuses on comparisons of productivity, (unit) labor cost and industry-level competitiveness for the manufacturing sector of China and India. We first provide a comparison between India and China using a broad international perspective. We find that China has increased its labor...

This paper examines the evolution of productivity in U.S. manufacturing plants from 1963 to 1992. We define a "vintage effect" as the change in productivity of recent cohorts of new plants relative to earlier cohorts of new plants, and a "survival effect" as the change in productivity of a...

This study offers empirical evidence about how the structure of government and private ownership affects productivity in Chinese firms. It uses the microdata of China’s most recent decennial industrial census, covering all of the 23,000 large and medium industrial firms operating in China...

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...