In this paper, annual indices of labour input adjusted for the education, age and gender distributions of the UK workforce are presented for the period 1975-2002. These measures show that improvement in labour quality, as proxied by education, age and gender, has added on average 0.67 percentage points per year to the growth rate in total labour input. Changes in the education distribution more than account for the improvement in labour quality, adding 0.68 percentage points per annum. Changes in the age distribution have made a much smaller contribution, adding only 0.11 percentage points to the growth rate. The rise in female participation has had a small negative effect of 0.08 percentage points, as women have had a preference for part-time work, which tends to be paid less per hour than full-time jobs. Using this evidence, the key finding of this paper is that a large proportion of growth that is usually attributed to TFP (total factor productivity) growth can be accounted for by an improvement in the quality of labour input. This result has no implications for the measurement of UK GDP growth from 1975-2002, but it does help to identify more accurately the sources of that growth.
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.
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.: