Читать книгу Sustainable Futures - Raphael Kaplinsky - Страница 21

The quantity of investment does not necessarily translate into increased output: it all depends on the quality – that is the productivity – of investment. There is a widespread belief that productivity was enhanced by the diffusion of computing across a range of industries after the invention of the microprocessor in 1971. Surely, it was argued, the availability of equipment capable of speeding up data-processing, providing greater accuracy in production and communicating with similar electronically controlled equipment would facilitate the substitution of machines for human endeavour – in other words, speed up labour productivity growth? And surely, electronically controlled machinery would be more productive than mechanically controlled equipment? Surprisingly, the evidence does not support this assertion. This led the Nobel Prize-winner Robert Solow to remark in 1987 that ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’

As can be seen from Figure 2.3, with the exception of a productivity-growth decade in the US after 1997, resulting from the initial deployment of ICTs, all of the major economies witnessed a declining trend in their growth of productivity (in this case, labour productivity) after World War 2. This fall in the rate of productivity growth was accentuated after the 2008 Financial Crisis. The productivity growth rates in the most recent decade (1 per cent, 0.9 per cent, 0.9 per cent, 0.6 per cent, 0.4 per cent and – 0.4 per cent for the US, Japan, Germany, France, UK and Italy, respectively) were significantly below those for the whole period between 1951 and 2017 (1.9 per cent, 4.1 per cent, 3.4 per cent, 3.1 per cent, 2.3 per cent and 2.6 per cent, respectively).

Figure 2.3 Annual growth of labour productivity, 1951–2019

Source: data from The Conference Board (www.conference-board.org)