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)...

Boosting productivity growth is necessary to raise living standards and well-being for all. Aggregate productivity has fallen, mainly driven by manufacturing, although service industries have also tended to underperform. Reviving productivity requires improving framework conditions further so...

A highly educated and skilled workforce has been an important driver of productivity performance and prosperity in Belgium. This paper examines skills policies that could help improve productivity and inclusiveness. An increased focus on lifelong learning, improved and more flexible working...

OECD countries and their regions are ageing fast. In principle, the negative impact of ageing on the growth rate of per capita gross domestic product could be offset by increases in productivity. However, for many regions, productivity growth required to maintain per capita GDP levels constant...

With a newly constructed firm-level dataset combining various survey- and registry data from Statistics Estonia, this paper sheds new light on the labour productivity premium from adopting digital technologies and boosting digital skill use. The productivity premium is decomposed into a direct...

We study the impact of broadband availability on firms’ total factor productivity (TFP) using German firm-level data between 2010 and 2015. We adopt a control function approach to causally identify and separately estimate productivity for 46 two-digit manufacturing and service sectors. Over...

Technological change is transforming Ireland’s economic structures, leading to new jobs and innovative products that benefit consumers. Adoption of new technologies by businesses has been high relative to many other OECD economies, but it has been uneven across industries and the impact on...

After developing at an increasingly slower pace over the decades, labor productivity in Germany has recently stagnated. This is in contrast to the development of the workforce’s qualifications, which have been growing steadily due to rapid academicization. These phenomena can be found in other...

While artificial intelligence (AI) adoption holds the potential to enhance business operations through improved forecasting and automation, its relation with average productivity growth remain highly heterogeneous across firms. This paper shifts the focus and investigates the impact of...

This paper studies the productivity effects of intangible assets using 9th vintage of the CompNet dataset. Descriptive work shows that there is dispersion in usage of intangibles; some firms invest heavily into intangible assets and many firms do not invest at all. In addition, preliminary...