A collection of 50 articles from professional journals and previous collections, most from the 1970s and 1980s, but ranging from the 1950s to the 1990s. They cover production functions and growth accounting; research and development and technological spillovers; evolutionary, Schumpeterian, and technology-gap models; productivity convergence; endogenous growth theory; multi-sectoral approaches; and the productivity slowdown. Among the specific topics are approaches to the theory and measurement of total factor productivity, issues in assessing the contribution of research and development to productivity growth, the rise and fall of American technological leadership during the postwar era, economic growth in a cross-section of countries, increasing returns and economic geography, growth accounting with intermediate inputs, and the analysis of some contributing factors to the slowdown in productivity growth. No index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
The Economics of Productivity provides an anthology of many of the leading papers on productivity analysis
The Economics of Productivity provides an anthology of many of the leading papers on productivity analysis. Part 1 of the collection portrays the development of production functions and growth accounting, including classic papers by Robert Solow, Dale Jorgenson, Edward Denison, and Angus Maddison. Part 2 covers topics on the economics of research and development and technological spillovers, featuring works by Zvi Griliches and Edwin Mansfield. Part 3 is devoted to evolutionary and Schumpeterian models of technological change, including articles by Richard Nelson and Sydney Winter. Studies by Moses Abramovitz and William Baumol, both published in 1986, document a convergence in labour productivity among industrialized economies, and Part 4 includes several seminal papers on this topic. Part 5 treats another important development in productivity analysis - endogenous growth theory, in which production itself creates the conditions of further technical change. The input-output framework provides another powerful system for the measurement of productivity growth, and articles on this topic are presented in Part 6. A dramatic slowdown in the rate of productivity growth occurred in the early 1970s and this development spawned a large literature on the subject of productivity, which is highlighted in the last part of the volume.
