The Productivity Slowdown in Advanced Economies: Common Shocks or Common Trends?
回顾了发达经济体近几十年的生产率发展，聚焦2000年代中期欧洲大国和美国的劳动生产率放缓，分析其原因是全要素生产率增长放缓，并对比了全球金融危机冲击与共同趋势两种解释。
This paper reviews advanced‐economy productivity developments in recent decades. We focus primarily on the facts about, and explanations for, the mid‐2000s labor‐productivity slowdown in large European countries and the United States. Slower total factor productivity (TFP) growth was the proximate cause of the slowdown. This conclusion is robust to measurement challenges including the role of intangible assets, rankings of productivity levels, and data revisions. We contrast two main narratives for the stagnating TFP frontier: The shock of the Global Financial Crisis; and a common slowdown in TFP trends. Distinguishing these two empirically is hard, but the pre‐recession timing of the U.S. slowdown suggests an important role for the common‐trend explanation. We also discuss the unusual pattern of labor productivity growth since the start of the Covid‐19 pandemic. Although it is early, there is little evidence so far that the large pandemic shock has changed the slow pre‐pandemic trajectory of labor‐productivity growth.