IPM archive

This commentary examines persistent concerns about the cost of living among Canadians, a phenomenon also observed across many developed economies. Despite macroeconomic indicators showing that household income has generally grown faster than prices in recent years, approximately 60 per cent of Canadians identify the cost of living as a primary concern. Drawing on polling data, economic…

Understanding health care productivity is critical, as the sector accounts for about 17 per cent of U.S. gross domestic product. However, official statistics likely understate productivity growth by failing to capture improvements in medical technology and treatment quality. The Health Care Satellite Account (HCSA), developed by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, addresses this gap by…

U.S. manufacturing labour productivity growth fell from roughly 3.5 per cent per year over 1987–2007 to near zero over 2010–2022. Growth in total factor productivity (TFP) also fell to near zero over the same period. This article examines the sources of that slowdown by decomposing manufacturing productivity growth into contributions from leader and follower firms within…

Why did U.S. manufacturing productivity stop growing after 2010? Productivity growth actually disappeared, from an annual rate of +3.3 per cent during 1987-2010 to -0.3 per cent from 2010 to 2023. This article shifts attention from 2010 as the start of the productivity growth slowdown to a decade earlier when output stopped growing. This cessation of…

Despite major advances in technology, productivity growth has slowed across advanced economies. Brynjolfsson, Rock and Syverson (2021) argued that, due to the large intangible investments associated with digitalization, total factor productivity (TFP) growth may be underestimated and be higher after the investment boom. The resulting gap between standard and revised measures produces a J-shaped pattern, the…

With the advent of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), the scope of AI has increased dramatically, but its effect on labour productivity remains uncertain. Some innovations raise labour productivity growth as adoption spreads but the effect fades when the market is saturated. In contrast, two types of innovation — general purpose technologies (GPTs) and inventions in the…

Issue 50 marks the IPM’s 25th anniversary — having published 350 articles since 2000 — and the transition to a new editorial team (Stephen Tapp joins as Managing Editor, replacing Andrew Sharpe who founded the journal). The issue covers five broad themes: GenAI and productivity (Baily et al.); the productivity J-curve and digitalization from an international…

Diane Coyle’s The Measure of Progress offers a thought-provoking critique of traditional economic metrics, particularly GDP and the System of National Accounts (SNA). These metrics, she argues, are inadequate for capturing the complexities of modern economies and fail to provide a satisfactory answer to the question, “Are things getting better, and for whom?”. This review article…

This article focuses on two features of the Jorgenson model of production, which is commonly used in productivity research. First, that capital stock is efficiency adjusted in that model, but hours are not. If hours are efficiency adjusted, as proposed in this article, the efficiency per hour of a much younger male college degree worker in…

This article investigates whether efficiencies defenses in merger control lead to greater economic efficiency, specifically by examining their impact on national total factor productivity (TFP) growth. Efficiencies defenses are provisions in competition law that allow efficiencies from mergers to be weighed against potential harms. While increasingly common—present in 40.4 per cent of countries by 2010—their effectiveness…