Productivity growth is slowing down among OECD countries, coupled with increased misallocation of resources. A recent strand of literature focuses on the role of non-viable firms (“zombie firms”) to explain these developments. Using a rich firm-level dataset for one of the OECD countries...

In this report we review the literature on the relationship between ICT and productivity. In Sect. 1 we discuss in broad terms the theoretical relationship between ICT and productivity, while in Sect. 2 we present the growth accounting methodology, which tries to measure the contributions to...

Boosting productivity growth is necessary to raise living standards and well-being for all. Aggregate productivity has fallen, mainly driven by manufacturing, although service industries have also tended to underperform. Reviving productivity requires improving framework conditions further so...

Productivity in Russia has fallen steadily over the past 15 years. This paper explores micro-level data to understand the contribution of individual firms to aggregate productivity. Overall, firm-level data corroborate the decline in aggregate productivity and a widening productivity gap against...

Since the start of the Great Recession, labour productivity growth has been weak in the United Kingdom, weaker than in many other OECD countries. The productivity shortfall, defined as the gap between actual productivity and the level implied by its pre-crisis trend growth rate, was nearly 20%...

The Chinese economy has been undergoing fundamental structural changes since the start of reforms in 1978. An increasing number of farmers first got engaged in off-farm activities and then started to migrate to cities in the 1990s in search of jobs. Such movement of labour from less to more...

With a newly constructed firm-level dataset combining various survey- and registry data from Statistics Estonia, this paper sheds new light on the labour productivity premium from adopting digital technologies and boosting digital skill use. The productivity premium is decomposed into a direct...

Technologies such as cloud computing, software to automate supplier- and customer relations, online platforms and artificial intelligence seem to offer a vast potential to boost productivity and living standards. However, aggregate productivity growth has declined sharply across the OECD over...