The Industry Anatomy of the Transatlantic Productivity Growth Slowdown: Europe Chasing the American Frontier

Robert J. Gordon () and Hassan Sayed

International Productivity Monitor, 2019, vol. 37, 3-38

Abstract: By merging KLEMS data covering 16 industry groups within the total economy and 11 manufacturing sub-industries, we compare and contrast productivity growth from 1950 to 2015 in the United States with an aggregate of the ten largest European nations (EU-10) from 1972 to 2015. We interpret the EU-10 performance as catching up to the United States in stages. Strikingly, the total economy "early-to-late" productivity growth slowdown from 1972-1995 to 2005-2015 in the EU-10 (-1.68 percentage points) was almost identical to the U.S. slowdown from 1950-1972 to 2005-2015 (-1.67 percentage points). There is a very high EU-U.S. correlation in the magnitude of the early-to-late slowdown in each industry, suggesting that the productivity growth slowdown from the early postwar years to the most recent decade was due to a retardation in technical change that affected the same industries by roughly the same magnitudes on both sides of the Atlantic.

Keywords: Productivity growth; Europe; United States (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F4 O4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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