A longstanding basis of empirical economics is that average labour productivity declines during recessions and increases during booms, and thus behaves procyclically. In the short run, in many countries output growth and productivity tend to move together and across a wide range of industries....

One of the most conventional statements in economics, with regard to the services sector, suggests that, as a whole, this sector has a lower productivity level and growth rates than the other productive sectors. From this approach, we can derive the relative lower productivity in some advanced...

We rely on the economic theory approach to index numbers to improve the existing definitions and decompositions of variations in generalized transport costs (GTCs). As a value index, we decompose GTCs into price and quantity indices associated to economic—market—costs and infrastructure...