Tag Archives: productivity

When the banks fell over, they knocked the stuffing out of the British economy. The UK’s productivity has been dismal ever since. Unemployment has fallen to historic lows and wages are rising, but productivity growth remains near zero. This “productivity puzzle,” as it is known, has had economists scratching their heads for best part of a decade.But UK productivity is a tale of two halves. Experimental statistics recently released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reveal widely...

When the banks fell over, they knocked the stuffing out of the British economy. The UK’s productivity has been dismal ever since. Unemployment has fallen to historic lows and wages are rising, but productivity growth remains near zero. This “productivity puzzle,” as it is known, has had economists scratching their heads for best part of a decade.But UK productivity is a tale of two halves. Experimental statistics recently released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reveal widely...

This post concerns an implication of Marx’s treatment of productivity and labor complexity for the appropriateness of alternative processes of wage determination. For simplicity, it is assumed that all activity is productive in Marx’s sense (that is, productive of surplus value) and that conditions are competitive in the Marxian (and classical) sense that investment is free to flow in and out of sectors in search of the highest return. Introducing unproductive labor, including a substantial...

Continuation.Bill Mitchell – billy blogPuzzle: Has real wages growth outstripped productivity growth or not? – Part 2Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

I am currently working through the entire Commissaire Maigret detective series written by Belgian author author Georges Simenon. I read a lot as I travel around and I have 74 (out of 75) Maigret novels to read. But don’t let that fool you, I am already becoming familiar with Maigret’s forensic way of thinking (-:. So for the next two blog posts we will be conducting a forensic examination of data to solve a puzzle that appears to be confusing people. This is the sort of puzzle that people...

Last week I attended a workshop entitled "Enhancing the Bank of England Toolkit," hosted by the Progressive Economy Forum. Presented at the workshop, and underpinning most of the debate, was this report from GFC Economics and Clearpoint Advisers, which was written for the Labour Party and first issued last June. The report was widely criticised at the time, as one of its authors ruefully observed in the introduction to the presentation. Nonetheless, the authors presented it unamended.The...

All of the above, of course, is simply the fleshing out of assumptions. We assumeddiminishing productivity in the last hours, we assumed heightened productivity from a shorter working week and we assumed declining marginal utility of goods and services produced. Finally, we assumed a preference for free time over a vanishingly small increment of total income. The point is that each of these assumptions were relatively modest but when combined "add up" to a rather substantial cumulative...

I am resuming work on pondering the business cycle, and just wanted to give some initial comments about the notion of productivity. This article just describes some basic concepts taken from a generic post-Keynesian perspective (plus some of my own views, which may or may not be eccentric). As work progresses on my book, I should address the neo-classical approach, as well as empirical results. Bond EconomicsProductivity And The CycleBrian Romanchuk

If productivity is plummeting in the workplace, the solution might be simple: Make the work week shorter. One company did just that by experimenting with a four-day work week. The trial was so successful, management is seeking to make the change permanent.... CNBC4-day work week is a success, New Zealand experiment finds Sarah Berger

Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for a robot revolution in manufacturing to boost productivity. Wages in China are rising, and it's becoming harder to compete with cheap labor. An aging population in China also necessitates automation. The working-age population, people age 15 to 64, could drop to 800 million by 2050 from 998 million today. Chinese robotic growth is forecast to exceed 20 percent annually through 2020. Interesting article to read in full. China's socialist ideology...