Does the United States Have a Productivity Slowdown or a Measurement Problem?
Does the United States Have a Productivity Slowdown or a Measurement Problem?
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美国是否存在生产力放缓或衡量问题？
DOI：
10.17016/feds.2016.017
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发表时间：
2016
影响因子：
5.9
通讯作者：
Marshall B. Reinsdorf
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
David M. Byrne;John G. Fernald;Marshall B. Reinsdorf
2004年后，劳动生产率和全要素生产率的增长放缓。我们发现，几乎没有证据表明，这种放缓是由于对信息技术相关产品和服务创新收益的错误计量造成的。首先，在经济放缓之前，对信息技术硬件的错误测量是很重要的。由于这些产品的国内生产下降，尽管某些类型的信息技术的错误测量恶化，但1995-2004年期间对生产率的数量影响比此后更大。因此，我们的调整使劳动生产率下降的情况更加严重。对全要素生产率的影响则更为微弱。其次，从概念上讲，智能手机、谷歌搜索和Facebook等“新”经济给消费者带来的巨大好处是非市场的：消费者在利用非市场时间生产他们看重的服务时更有效率。这些好处提高了消费者的福利，但并不意味着市场部门生产功能的转移速度比衡量的更快。此外，非市场生产的估计收益太小，无法弥补市场部门生产率增长放缓造成的总体福祉损失。除了信息技术之外，我们可以量化的其他衡量问题（例如日益增长的全球化和水力压裂）相对于经济放缓而言也很小。
After 2004, measured growth in labor productivity and total factor productivity slowed. We find little evidence that this slowdown arises from growing mismeasurement of the gains from innovation in information technology–related goods and services. First, the mismeasurement of information technology hardware is significant preceding the slowdown. Because the domestic production of these products has fallen, the quantitative effect on productivity was larger in the 1995–2004 period than since then, despite mismeasurement worsening for some types of information technology. Hence, our adjustments make the slowdown in labor productivity worse. The effect on total factor productivity is more muted. Second, many of the tremendous consumer benefits from the “new” economy such as smartphones, Google searches, and Facebook are, conceptually, nonmarket: Consumers are more productive in using their nonmarket time to produce services they value. These benefits raise consumer well-being but do not imply that market sector production functions are shifting out more rapidly than measured. Moreover, estimated gains in nonmarket production are too small to compensate for the loss in overall well-being from slower market sector productivity growth. In addition to information technology, other measurement issues that we can quantify (such as increasing globalization and fracking) are also quantitatively small relative to the slowdown.