Economic Growth and Labour Productivity

Abstract

There is more and more dependence in all countries on intensive methods to achieve economic growth.¹ By this is meant more efficient use of the whole group of factors of production; it is equivalent to an increase in the productivity of all labour. In a developed socialist society this has unquestionable priority over extensive development, although the latter can never be wholly excluded. The ecological and economic limits to the increase of the volume in which the usual types of fuel and raw materials can be extracted, and the inevitable resort to less rich and less favourably located mineral sources, together with current demographic trends, inevitably imply increasing dependence on intensive growth.