Labour Productivity Growth and Convergence in the EU: The Role of Physical and Human Capital Accumulation.

The aim of this article is to analyse labour productivity growth and convergence in the EU-15 countries between 1980 and 1997. Adopting a production frontier approach, labour productivity growth is broken down into components attributable to efficiency change, technological progress and capital accumulation. Furthermore, in the spirit of the Quah´s approach, the dynamics of the distribution of labour productivity is also analysed. Our results show that physical and human capital accumulation appears to be the main force driving the labour productivity growth and convergence processes experienced by the European economies during these years. On the other hand, we observe that some problems appear in the EU-15 in terms of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth.