Скачать или смотреть The U.S. productivity slowdown: an economy-wide and industry-level analysis

The U.S. #productivity #slowdown: an #economy-wide and #industry-level #analysis.

Labor productivity—defined as output per labor hour—has grown at a below-average rate since 2005, representing a dramatic reversal of the above-average growth of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The productivity slowdown during these years has left many economic observers wondering why this situation has occurred and what factors may have contributed. To clarify potential sources of the productivity slowdown, this article presents an analysis of labor productivity and its component series—multifactor productivity, contribution of capital intensity, and contribution of labor composition—at both the economywide and industry levels, complemented with a survey of the contemporary productivity literature.
The figure—$10.9 trillion—represents the cumulative loss in output in the U.S. nonfarm business sector due to the labor productivity slowdown since 2005, also corresponding to a loss of $95,000 in output per worker.[1]
These figures show that, when there is consistently below average productivity growth, year after year, a substantial effect can result over an extended period. How could this situation have occurred, in a modern and technically advanced economy such as in the United States? Well, not only has the productivity slowdown been one of the most consequential economic phenomena of the last two decades, but it also represents the most profound economic mystery during this time, and though many economists have grappled with the issue for over a decade and even created some innovative research approaches to address the question, we still cannot fully explain what brought on this situation.
One of the more perplexing aspects of the current slowdown is its genesis: that it came immediately following a historic productivity boom in the United States, and represented a swift rebuke of the popular idea of that time that we had entered a new era of heightened technological progress. The suddenness and size of the reversal were difficult to comprehend. For some background, in the late 1990s, when that much-cited productivity boom had begun, U.S. labor productivity growth had accelerated to rates of change that had not been seen since the late 1960s and early 1970s. This late 1990s surge surprised many economic observers, who had become accustomed to the below-average productivity growth rates of the mid-to-late 1970s through the early 1990s. In addition, the situation in the United States was even more startling due to the fact that the rest of the more-developed economies of the world were not similarly experiencing a speedup in growth rates.[2]
A debate ensued among economists: Was the tremendous productivity growth of the late 1990s here to stay—a fundamental change generated by the computing and internet-related innovations that were all around us—or was it a temporary phenomenon that would pass? The fact that the productivity speedup persisted through the recession of 2001, and then became even more pronounced in 2002, convinced many observers that perhaps something had changed.[3] The acceleration of U.S. productivity growth is shown in figure 1, illustrated by the growth rates during 1998 through 2005, which rise above the long-term average rate since 1947, denoted by the dashed blue line. Over these high-growth years, U.S. labor productivity grew at an average rate of 3.3 percent,[4] which is markedly higher than the cumulative 2.1-percent average rate from 1947 to 2018.
This high-growth period came to an end during the mid-2000s, when U.S. labor productivity growth rates began to stumble, and in 2006 receded below the long-term average trend line for the first time in a decade. And, notwithstanding 2 years of high growth in 2009 and 2010 following the Great Recession, productivity growth rates have remained stubbornly low in subsequent years. Many economic observers were yet again surprised, in this case at just how drastically growth rates slowed, given the recently observed high rates of growth and the continued #technological #innovations that were proliferating throughout the economy. In the years since 2005, labor productivity has grown at an average annual rate of just 1.3 percent, which is lower than the 2.1-percent long-term average rate from 1947 to 2018. The slow growth observed since 2010 has been even more striking: labor productivity grew just 0.8 percent from 2010 to 2018.
As the slowdown in labor productivity growth has steadily held on throughout the past decade, economic observers have been trying to understand this phenomenon, which has the effect of placing downward pressure on economic growth, worker compensation gains, profits growth, and gains in living standards of Americans. Many observers began to wonder: Why has U.S. labor productivity growth been so consistently low in recent years,...

Economy-wide analysis of the U.S. labor productivity slowdown,
Decomposition of labor productivity growth,