DEFINING AND MEASURING PRODUCTIVITY

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DEFINING AND MEASURING PRODUCTIVITY PRODUCTIVITY isn t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. A country s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker. Paul Krugman, The Age of Diminishing Expectations (1994) PRODUCTIVITY is commonly defined as a ratio between the output volume and the volume of inputs. In other words, it measures how efficiently production inputs, such as labour and capital, are being used in an economy to produce a given level of output.

After computing the contributions of labour and capital to output, the so-called multi-factor productivity (MFP) can be derived. It measures the residual growth that cannot be explained by the rate of change in the services of labour, capital and intermediate outputs, and is often interpreted as the contribution to economic growth made by

  Factors, Productivity, Factor productivity