The report specifically deals with productivity of labor and total input. Productivity gains are a good measure of technological progress: economically, technology helps to increase output generated from a given level of input.
The authors find:
The past 120 years have been characterized by: (i) rapid economic growth and large productivity gains in all four countries; (ii) a long decline of productivity in the United Kingdom relative to the United States, and to a lesser extent also to France and Japan, a relative decline that was interrupted by the second world war (WW2); (iii) the remarkable catching-up to the United States by France and Japan after WW2, that stopped in the case of Japan during the 1990s.Much, but not all, of these changes are due to the use of information and communication technology (ICT). The report is an excellent resource for learning about how economies change over time.
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