The work presents labor productivity estimates from 1991 to 2008 for 17 countries on industry ISIC. 3 – level (calculations for the whole economy-level last till 2012 year). The group of countries includes USA, Canada, Brazil, Russia, Japan, China, Australia and number of major European econo-mies. The goal is to investigate Russia`s industries comparative progress, productivity gap changes and asses possible sources for technology borrowing. In contrast to previous works analysis captures dy-namics of wider country grouping on more detailed industry level. Productivity is calculated as value added per hour worked for the following industries: agriculture, hunting, forestry and fishing (A+B), mining, electricity, gas and water supply (C+E), manufacturing (D), construction (F), wholesale and re-tail trade, hotels and restaurants (G+H), transport (I) and others (J-P). After period of transition Russia has reached own 1991`s level of productivity (per worker) and per capita GDP in 2004 and 2005-2006 years respectively. But if we measure Russia`s productivity or per capita GDP in terms of US levels, the question of reaching 1991 level has no unequivocal answer. It depends on preferred estimation methodology of catching up development, more precisely, on way of converting productivity and per capita GDP to common currency: use general accepted constant prices and constant PPP methodology (as in ((Maddison, 1995) and OECD, BLS USA, PWT calculations), or use current (benchmark) PPPs (WB data) to asses relative (to US) performance of Russia. Reasons of faster per capita GDP growth comparing to labor productivity in Russia in 2000s are explained. In 2008 productivity (per hour) gap between Russia and US was approximately threefold, com-paring with European countries – twofold. Sectoral productivity analysis shows that such a differences in some industries are even greater: up to 4 times in agriculture and transportation comparing with US and 13.5 times in mining and energy sectors (C+E I.S.I.C.) comparing with Norway. ...
