Abstract
The rise in unemployment is often blamed not only on the slowdown in economic growth but also on the increasing pressure to rationalise. Greater rationalisation should, however, have led to an increase in labour productivity, but this has not happened in the Federal Republic of Germany nor in a series of other major industrial countries. Instead, there has been a marked slowdown in the rate of productivity advance. Why is this, and what is the outlook for the future?
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A comprehensive account is to be found in Edward F. Dennison: Accounting for slower economic growth, Washington D. C. 1979; and in Manfred Wegner: Produktivitätsfortschritte in den 80ern (Productivity gains in the eighties), in: WIRTSCHAFTSDIENST, No. 2, 1980, pp. 86–92.
Cf. Richard B. Freeman, James L. Medoff: The two faces of unionism, in: Public Interest, Fall 1979, Vol. 57, pp. 69–93, quoted in Richard R. Nelson: Research on productivity growth and productivity differences: Dead ends and new departures, in: Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 19, 1981, pp. 1029–1064.
Cf. HWWA-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung: Analyse der strukturellen Entwicklung der deutschen Wirtschaft (Analysis of the Structural Development of the German Economy), Hamburg 1981, pp. 136–140.
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Hecker, G.F. A comparison of productivity in the Federal Republic of Germany, Japan and the USA. Intereconomics 17, 286–290 (1982). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02930173
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02930173