Cross-country differences in the measurement of labour input contribute to observed productivity gaps across countries. In most countries, labour force surveys (LFS) form a primary source of information for employment related statistics, such as persons employed, employees and hours worked. However, because the coverage of LFS does not fully align with the coverage of activities used to estimate GDP, additional adjustments relying on complementary sources, such as administrative or business statistics, are often applied to bridge conceptual differences, and in many countries, the use of these sources is often preferred to LFS data. Evidence from the 2018 OECD/Eurostat national accounts labour input survey shows that the adjustments made to align measures of labour input with the corresponding measures of production according to the domestic concept, vary considerably across countries, with many countries making no adjustments, in particular, for the measurement of hours worked. This paper demonstrates that countries making no adjustments to average hours worked measures extracted from the original source, such as self-reported hours actually worked in the LFS, appear to systematically overestimate labour input and, so, under-estimate labour productivity levels. To illustrate the size of this bias, for this group of countries, the paper adopts a simplified component method that introduces a series of explicit adjustments on working time using information available in LFS and complementary sources. The results point to a reduction in relative productivity gaps of around 10 percentage points in many countries compared to current estimates. Although future releases of OECD productivity (levels) statistics will incorporate these changes, it is important to stress that these estimates will only be used as a stop-gap while countries making no, or minimal adjustments, work to leverage all available data sources to produce average hours worked estimates that align with the national accounts domestic concept and that address selfreporting bias; which is the paper's principal recommendation for those countries that currently make no or only partial adjustments. Indeed, many EU member states, coordinated by Eurostat, are already moving in this direction, with ESA 2010 derogations set to expire by 2020.
A key feature of the 2008 revision of the System of National Accounts was the treatment of research and development (R&D) expenditure as investment. The question arises whether the standard approach toward accounting for growth contribution of assets is justified, given the special nature of R&D that provides capital services by affecting the working of other inputs as a whole—akin to technical change and often requires up‐front investment with sunk costs. We model R&D inputs with a restricted cost function and compare econometric estimates with those derived under a standard index number approach but find no significant differences. However, we cannot reject the hypothesis of increasing returns to scale. The standard multi‐factor productivity (MFP) measure is then broken down into a scale effect and a residual productivity effect, each of which explains about half of overall MFP change. The scale effect points to the importance of the demand side and market size for productivity growth. We also compute mark‐up rates of prices over marginal cost and find widespread evidence of rising mark‐ups for the period 1985–2017.
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El trabajo presenta un análisis empírico sobre la convergencia para América Latina durante el periodo 1960-2009, por medio de estimaciones de datos de panel. La evidencia encontrada no indica la presencia de convergencia absoluta ni condicional, ni tampoco la existencia de clubes de convergencia. A su vez, los resultados de las estimaciones realizadas con efectos fijos muestran que no existe convergencia condicional, lo que sugiere que cada economía converge a su propio estado estacionario.
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