This paper shows how misleading is the facile contrast of Europe following a path of high productivity growth, high unemployment, and relatively greater income equality, in contrast to the opposite path being pursued by the United States. While structural shocks may initially create a positive tradeoff between productivity and unemployment, they set in motion a dynamic path of adjustment involving capital accumulation or decumulation that in principle can eliminate the tradeoff. The main theoretical contributions of this paper are to show how a productivity-unemployment tradeoff might emerge and how it might subsequently disappear as this dynamic adjustment path is set in motion. Its empirical work develops a new data base for levels and growth rates of output per hour, capital per hour, and multifactor productivity in the G-7 nations both for the aggregate economy and for nine sub-sectors. It provides regression estimates that decompose observed differences in productivity growth across sectors. It finds that much of the productivity growth advantage of the four large European countries over the United States is explained by convergence and by more rapid capital accumulation, and that the only significant effect of higher unemployment is to cause capital accumulation to decelerate, thus reducing the growth rate of output per hour relative to multi-factor productivity.
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.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
5081.
Length: Date of creation: Feb 1998 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:5081
Note: EFG IFM LS PR Contact details of provider: Postal: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. Phone: 617-868-3900 Email: Web page: http://www.nber.org More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: ().
Find related papers by JEL classification: D24 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Production; Capital and Total Factor Productivity; Capacity E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomics: Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution
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.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.