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The OECD Compendium of Productivity Indicators presents a broad overview of recent and longer term trends in productivity levels and growth across OECD countries and key partner economies. It highlights the key measurement issues faced when compiling cross-country comparable productivity indicators and describes the caveats needed in analyses. It examines the role of productivity as the main driver of economic growth and convergence, and the contributions of labour, capital and multifactor productivity to economic growth. It looks at the contribution of individual industries or sectors as well as the role of firm size in productivity performance. It explores the link between productivity, trade and international competitiveness, and analyses trends as compared with cyclical patterns in labour and multifactor productivity growth.
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Eight years after the global financial crisis, GDP growth remains below pre-crisis rates in most countries, leading to concerns that the global economy has been stuck in a “low-growth trap”, with the post-crisis period being described by some analysts as the “decade of lost growth”. A striking feature of the post-crisis period has been a continuation of a long-term slowdown in productivity growth that has gone hand-in-hand with weak levels of investment. This matters because, as an important driver of growth, productivity has also been an important driver of improvements in living standards primarily through higher wages. But significant declines in labour’s share of income and a decoupling of labour productivity growth and real wage growth in many economies over the last two to three decades suggest that stylised assumptions about the relationship between labour productivity growth and wage growth may no longer hold, raising concerns about inequalities: labour income tends to play a larger role as a source of income among lower-income households and, so, a decline in the labour share may widen overall income distribution.
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The statistical data for Israel are supplied by and under the responsibility of the relevant Israeli authorities or third parties. The use of such data by the OECD is without prejudice to the status of the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem and Israeli settlements in the West Bank under the terms of international law.
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Eight years after the global financial crisis, GDP per capita remains at pre-crisis levels, or even below, in many economies. In some European economies, including Finland, Italy and Spain, GDP per capita in 2015 (in real terms) was around 10% lower than the level achieved in 2007. Indeed, among OECD countries only a handful, chiefly “catch-up” countries – Chile, Poland, Korea and Turkey – saw a significant improvement on pre-crisis levels and although emerging economies fared much better, growth rates in most have slowed considerably in the post-crisis period. The overall picture points to slowing rates of growth in most countries, compared to the pre-crisis period, and with it fears of many being trapped in a low-growth environment (), as productivity growth continues its long-term decline in most economies ().
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This chapter presents relevant methodological information on the productivity indicators available in this publication and/or disseminated in the OECD Productivity Statistics (database). It discusses the different existing concepts of hours worked and describes the sources used to measure hours worked for the purposes of productivity analysis. It provides a brief description of capital stocks and capital input measures available at the OECD, highlighting the distinction between two key measures of capital: the productive capital stock and the gross (or net) wealth capital stock. The chapter also provides a summary of the major changes introduced by the System of National Accounts 2008 (2008 SNA), with respect to the 1993 SNA. Further, it describes important measurement issues when tracking price changes in the services sector and the potential significance of price measurement for measured productivity growth in services sectors. It presents the concept of Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs), describing the two different approaches for using PPPs in international comparisons of productivity levels: current PPPs and constant PPPs. The chapter ends with a detailed description of the trend estimation method used to compute productivity trends in this publication.