Tag Archives: productivity

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...

The global economy could be on the cusp of a productivity boom—and big opportunities for companies. Tidbit: However, capturing the productivity potential of advanced economies may require a focus on promoting both demand and digital diffusion in addition to more traditional supply-side approaches. McKinsey Five Fifty — A quick briefing in five—or a fifty-minute deeper dive The Coming Boom?

Knowledge flow.It is important to note that knowledge is a free good. The arrangement of words in books can be copyrighted, but not the knowledge they convey.However, the application of knowledge can be limited by making it "proprietary." In the past, many processes have been kept secret. e.g., transmitted in families. In contemporary times, processes for applying knowledge may be fenced in, at least for a time, with intellectual rights to processes such as patents.The IMF looks at the...

Why do we think the world is about to see the resurrection of the “comrade culture club” over the next ten years?  Make no mistake; there will be a visceral political reaction to the coming acceleration of labor disrupting technology. We got a little taste of it in the 2016 election. Just wait until it hits the doctoring, lawyering, and accounting class.... Technology replaced the farmers. Now it is coming for the industrial workers and many types of service workers, too. Soldiers and...

Whenever the topic of economic growth is broached, there is a common and understandable reaction along the lines that growth is ecologically unsustainable or socially harmful. Since one of the preoccupations of this blog is demand-led growth, it is perhaps worth pausing to reflect on the appropriateness of the topic. This can be broken down into two parts. Why consider growth as such? And why emphasize the possibility that growth is demand led?... heteconomistGrowth is Good?Peter Cooper

Productivity growth (the rate at which technology is displacing workers) had slowed to roughly 1.0 percent annually in the years since 2005. This compares to a 3.0 percent growth rate in the decade from 1995 to 2005 and the long Golden Age from 1947 to 1973. Most economists expect the rate of productivity growth to remain near 1.0 percent as opposed to returning back to something close to its 3.0 percent rate in more prosperous times.…  It is also worth noting that the high productivity...

Over the past decade in advanced western economies, the rate of improvement in prosperity has ground to the lowest point of the post-war period.  Stagnation is now the norm across the majority of the globe, and even in Asia more substantial gains are slowing.This position is illustrated by the comprehensive productivity...

On Wednesday 29 November 2017, PRIME's director, Ann Pettifor, gave evidence at the Committee's invitation to the UK Parliament's Treasury Select Committee, together with Professor Jagjit Chadha, Director, National Institute of Economic and Social Research and Paul Johnson, Director, Institute for Fiscal Studies. A verbatim report of the discussion can be found on the Select Committee's website here. Below we publish PRIME's written evidence to the Treasury Select Committee....

Review and critique of the latest OECD World Economic Outlook, from a Marxian POV. Useful. The key for me, as readers of this blog know, is what is happening to the profitability of capital in the major economies. If profitability is rising, then corporate investment and economic growth will follow – but also vice versa. But if profitability and profits are falling, debt accumulated will become a major burden. Eventually the zombies will start to go bankrupt, spreading across sectors and...