The Economics of Productivity

The Economics of Productivity provides an anthology of many of the leading papers on productivity analysis. Part 1 of the collection portrays the development of production functions and growth accounting, including classic papers by Robert Solow, Dale Jorgenson, Edward Denison, and Angus Maddison. Part 2 covers topics on the economics of research and development and technological spillovers, featuring works by Zvi Griliches and Edwin Mansfield. Part 3 is devoted to evolutionary and Schumpeterian models of technological change, including articles by Richard Nelson and Sydney Winter. Studies by Moses Abramovitz and William Baumol, both published in 1986, document a convergence in labour productivity among industrialized economies, and Part 4 includes several seminal papers on this topic. Part 5 treats another important development in productivity analysis – endogenous growth theory, in which production itself creates the conditions of further technical change. The input–output framework provides another powerful system for the measurement of productivity growth, and articles on this topic are presented in Part 6. A dramatic slowdown in the rate of productivity growth occurred in the early 1970s and this development spawned a large literature on the subject of productivity, which is highlighted in the last part of the volume.