International Comparison of Industry Productivity

The United States has long been considered the world’s productivity frontier, maintaining a sizeable aggregate productivity gap with Australia over the past quarter century. This paper finds that Australia’s industry structure does not appear to make a major difference to Australia’s productivity gap with the US, suggesting that the gap arises mainly from differences in productivity levels within industries. Using new data from the EU Klems project, this paper finds that Australia’s productivity level relative to the US differs markedly across industries.