Tag: productivity puzzle

The UK’s productivity puzzle is in the top tail of the distribution

Patrick Schneider

UK productivity growth has been puzzlingly slow since the crisis. After averaging 2% every year in the pre-crisis decade, growth in labour productivity (output per hour worked) has slowed to an average of only 0.5%. Extensive research and commentary on the productivity puzzles has suggested myriad causes for the malaise – including ‘zombie’ firms hoarding resources, sluggish investment in the face of uncertainty, mismeasurement and more – and have dismissed others that no longer seem plausible – including temporary labour hoarding. Using firm-level data, I show that slower aggregate growth is entirely driven by the more productive firms in the economy.

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Bitesize: Correction to ‘There are two productivity puzzles’

Patrick Schneider

Last year I published a post arguing that there are two productivity puzzles – one in the level and the other in the growth rate of labour productivity – that contained an error. In the original blog, I showed that we could decompose the puzzle(s!) into contributions from either slower than trend growth in capital services per hour worked (capital deepening) or technology growth (TFP).

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There are two productivity puzzles

Patrick Schneider.

Much has been written about the productivity puzzle. But there are actually two puzzles apparent in the data – one in the level that hit at the crisis and the other in the growth rate, which is a more recent phenomenon – and they could be driven by completely different sources. Distinguishing between the two puzzles is important precisely because of these potential differences – if anyone analyses the puzzle as a whole looking for the force driving it, the actual underlying variety will confound our estimates of the relative importance of these drivers.

In this post I discuss:

  1. what people mean by the productivity puzzle, usually a percent deviation from the pre-crisis trend;
  2. how I think of it as actually two puzzles: one in the level and the other in the growth rate; and
  3. why this distinction can be important, using the example of a simple growth accounting decomposition of productivity growth into capital deepening and technological advancement.

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