Productivity growth was higher in Europe than in the U.S. during the first half of the 1990s. Then the U.S. grabbed a dramatic lead in the second half, while Europe faltered.
According to a new Conference Board analysis:
But in the second half, the U.S. began to reap the benefits of those new technologies while Europe’s productivity began to slow sharply as relatively inexperienced workers found jobs as a result of efforts to tackle joblessness.
As to growth’s payoff in higher living standards, between 1995 and 2000 relative per capita income in the U.S. rose from 37 percent above that of Europe to 45 percent.
Those superior living standards are due not only to higher productivity rates, but also because Americans put in longer hours at work than Europeans, the researchers found.
Source: Gene Koretz, Economic Trends: Productivity: Trading Places, Business Week, April 30, 2001; Robert H. McGuckin and Bart Van Ark, Performance 2000: Productivity, Employment and Income in the World’s Economies, Report 1287, March 2001, Conference Board.
For Conference Board text
http://www.conference-board.org/search/dpress.cfm?pressid=4624
For more on International Comparisons of Productivity
http://www.ncpa.org/pd/economy/econ9.html
