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.