productivity

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Let’s Talk About Productivity

Fernando González Urbaneja | Two economic and labour issues are occupying the public debate: how to sustain employment and how to increase wages. These are seemingly incompatible goals, but labour markets are so complex they cannot be locked into simple equations. Claiming that lowering wages will increase employment is as unfounded as claiming that raising wages will reduce employment. There are other, more complex factors involved in order to achieve…



Productivity

Persistently problematic productivity

May 22, 2015 | UBS | Why has real GDP growth been surprisingly weak compared to job gains? Why do some economists expect only slowly-trending GDP expansion in the coming years? Why has the unemployment rate fallen more often than expected? 


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US & UK: Siamese twins? Up to a point

SAO PAULO  | By Marcus Nunes via Historinhas | NGDP and RGDP trends are rather similar in both countries. The main question is: Why is the UK´s labor market so much more exuberant?


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Where Has Productivity Growth Gone?

WASHINGTON | By Pablo Pardo | Progress, what progress? We live in an era of endless technological possibilities. Or so they say. We have drones to bomb every soul in the remotest desert; GPS to avoid getting lost while paying a visit to our in-laws (it remains to be seen if that is actually a good thing or not); cellphones to tell us how many calories we have burnt during a walk; robots to play the nurses’ role in hospitals (and sometimes they’re even nicer); and, soon, we will see driverless cars which, according to those who have tried them, are way safer than the current, human-controlled ones. In the meantime, this article is being written from Washington, DC, and it will be edited and posted online in New York, on a London-based website.


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Spain contracts but recovers faster than any other euro country

MADRID | After the national office for statistics in Spain confirmed everyone’s suspicions about the country returning to recession, with a -0.3% economic contraction versus expectations of -0.4% , a note from BBVA research team on Spain’s strengths could come handy as a reminder that the #spanic would be still avoidable and this Espan-hole could be safely closed. BBVA analysts explained in its monthly report aptly headlined ‘Leaving stereotypes behind‘ that…