The UK economy has undergone significant market reforms over the last two decades. A key question for productivity researchers is the impact of these reforms on productivity growth. In this article, Richard B. Freeman of the London School of Economics, Harvard University and the NBER and David Card of the University of California at Berkeley and the NBER examine trends in productivity growth in Britain and other major developed countries and estimate the impact of British economic reforms on British performance. Freeman and Card find that developments in the UK economy cannot be readily explained by standard macro-economic changes in labour or capital. They note that economic reforms were more important in the UK than in other countries and that the UK after 1979 arrested the nearly century-long trend in economic decline of the UK relative to its historic competitors, France and Germany. They conclude that reforms in the area of union-management relations, privatization, profit and share ownership, and self-employment increased UK productivity growth 0.35 per cent per year over the 1979-1999 period, accounting for one quarter of the pick-up in productivity between the 1960-79 and 1979-1999 periods.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Find related papers by JEL classification: O52 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Europe O57 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Comparative Studies of Countries E61 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Policy Objectives; Policy Designs and Consistency; Policy Coordination E66 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - General Outlook and Conditions
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)