TOWARDS AN EXPLANATION OF THE PRODUCTIVITY SLOWDOWN: AN ACCELERATION-DECELERATION HYPOTHESIS*

After two and a half decades of prosperous post-war development, western industrialised countries recently experienced a slowdown of economic growth and productivity advance together with an increase in the rates of inflation and unemployment. In trying to explain this malaise we are looking at a diagnosis that could help us to identify early indicators of a future turnaround or some policy variables which deserve to be included in a therapeutic programme. Although we shall focus on what can be measured, complying with the standards of the guild,' we shall not refrain from considering complex relationships which can be grasped only intuitively, even if they include phenomena which lie beyond the limits of official statistics.2 The outcome may be 'soft economics', but we find some consolation in the dictum that it is better to be vaguely right than to be precisely wrong.

[1]  D. Jorgenson,et al.  Relative productivity levels, 1947–1973: An international comparison , 1981 .

[2]  Michael Bruno,et al.  Raw Materials, Profits, and the Productivity Slowdown (Rev) , 1981 .

[3]  W. Baumol,et al.  MACROECONOMICS OF UNBALANCED GROWTH: THE ANATOMY OF THE URBAN CRISES , 1967 .

[4]  Lionel Robbins.  On the Elasticity of Demand for Income in Terms of Effort , 1930 .

[5]  P. Samuelson,et al.  Protection and Real Wages , 1941 .

[6]  P. Andersen.  The Productivity Slowdown and its Policy Implications , 1983 .

[7]  Edmond Malinvaud,et al.  The theory of unemployment reconsidered , 1978 .

[8]  J. Rotemberg,et al.  International Adjustment with Wage Rigidity , 1979 .

[9]  R. Nelson.  Research on Productivity Growth and Productivity Differences: Dead Ends and New Departures , 1981 .

[10]  Hans H. Glismann,et al.  Zur Natur der Wachstumsschwäche in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Eine empirische Analyse langer Zyklen wirtschaftlicher Entwicklung , 1978 .

[11]  R. Gordon,et al.  Why U.S. Wage and Employment Behavior Differs from that in Britain and Japan , 1981 .

[12]  A. Hansen.  Fiscal policy and business cycles , 1942 .

[13]  D. Jorgenson.  THE ROLE OF ENERGY IN THE U.S. ECONOMY , 1978, National Tax Journal.

[14]  Martin Neil Baily,et al.  Productivity Growth and Materials Use in U.S. Manufacturing [Productivity and the Services of Capital and Labor]. , 1981 .

[15]  S. J. Prais,et al.  Vocational Qualifications of the Labour Force in Britain and Germany , 1981, National Institute Economic Review.

[16]  J. Kendrick,et al.  Productivity in the United States: trends and cycles , 1981 .

[17]  Edwin Mansfield,et al.  Social and Private Rates of Return from Industrial Innovations , 1977 .

[18]  A. Okun,et al.  Equality and efficiency, the big tradeoff , 1975 .

[19]  Wallace E. Oates,et al.  The theory of environmental policy , 1976 .

[20]  B. Contini.  Labor Market Segmentation and the Development of the Parallel Economy-The Italian Experience , 1981 .

[21]  W. Nordhaus.  Oil and Economic Performance in industrial Countries , 1980 .

[22]  V. Tanzi.  L'economia sotterranea degli Stati Uniti: stime e implicazioni. (The underground economy in the United States: estimates and implications) , 1983 .

[23]  J. Sachs.  Wages, Profits, and Macroeconomic Adjustment: A Comparative Study , 1980 .