Tag Archives: productivity

The following was published by David Thorpe on the FT’s Adviser blog, and can be found here: https://www.ftadviser.com/investments/2017/11/30/obr-accused-of-damaging-uk-economy-with-productivity-data/ The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) and others including the government are wrongly focusing on the UK’s weak productivity growth in a way that is harming the future economic prospects of the country, according to Ann Pettifor, director of Prime Economics. Ms Pettifor was before...

Ah, productivity. Who knew that our whole prosperity was totally dependent on a concept as nebulous as this?To be sure, it doesn't sound nebulous. It is output per worker per hour. What is so difficult about that?The problem is how you define "output". Usually, we take this to mean GDP (gross domestic product), though we might use GNP (gross national product) or GVA (gross value added). In this post, I shall use GDP.As Diane Coyle has engagingly written, GDP is a deeply flawed measure....

Productivity is a problem and conventional British economists don't have a theory that explains it. So what to do? Oh, right, more blood letting (austerity).Stumbling and MumblingNotes on productivityChris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

The ONS's latest flash productivity estimate is rather good. Productivity in Quarter 3 2017 was up by 0.9% on the previous quarter. Here's what ONS has to say about it: Output per hour growth in Quarter 3 2017 was the result of a 0.4% increase in gross value added (GVA) (using the preliminary gross domestic product (GDP) estimate) accompanied by a 0.5% fall in total hours worked (using the latest Labour Force Survey data). This fall in total hours was driven primarily by a 0.5% fall in...

Apparently, whenever some poor economic news is published about the United Kingdom, journalists have to weave in their on-going gripe about the outpouring of democracy in June last year that saw the Brexit vote to leave successful. Its hysterical really. The most recent example is from the otherwise sensible Aditya Chakrabortty from the UK Guardian (October 17, 2017) – Who’s to blame for Brexit’s fantasy politics? The experts, of course. The story has nothing much to do with the June 2016...

‘America needs its unions more than ever.’ And ‘Labour reform could help restore the bargaining power of US workers.’ Can you believe that these are titles from articles in the Financial Times?  Mario Draghi, the president of the ECB, recently boasted that since 2015 the euro-zone gained more than 5 million jobs. New cheap jobs yes, and productivity remains historically low. Today’s lacking investment means that technology does not substitute for labour – the normal trajectory in...

"We need to discuss the complete disconnect between the marginal product of labour and labour wages," said Sir Chris Pissarides, speaking on the closing panel of the Lindau Economics Meeting.I tweeted this comment. Laurie MacFarlane of the New Economics Foundation promptly responded with this chart that brilliantly illustrates Sir Chris's point: "Quite why marginal productivity theory is still taught as something which explains the real world is beyond me," commented Laurie. Marginal...

China bought 90,000 robots in 2016, accounting for almost a third of the global total, and the robot revolution may raise China's economic competitiveness, according to a report released this week by Bloomberg Intelligence. China.org.cnChina on rapid progress of robotization: study Xinhua

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Chris Blattman & Stefan Dercon have an op-ed in the New York Times, reporting on their study with IPA and the Ethiopian Development Research Institute. They randomly offered poor workers in Ethiopia who were applying for factory jobs the jobs they wanted or an alternative entrepreneurship opportunity. Turns out the jobs were pretty bad – most quit and those that stayed weren’t any better off than those who never god a job...

The ONS has produced a fascinating discussion of the UK's productivity puzzle, with some great charts. This one shows just how much the UK's productivity has slumped: Notice when productivity started to slump. It was much earlier than 2008. In fact the data (which ONS have helpfully provided in Excel) show that output per hour started to fall in Q4 2006. The productivity slump, therefore, cannot be caused by the financial crisis. I suspect we have a "third variable" problem here. It seems...