Here, we present important publications on country, sector, industry and firm productivity by various researchers and organisations.
As De Loecker and Syverson state (see below): “The scope of productivity analysis is broad. It spans from micro to macro, ranging from the analysis of individual production lines in a factory to the study of economy-
wide aggregates. It treats these different scopes not just as separate objects but minds their connections as well, studying the efficiency of industry output allocation across heterogeneous producers and its relationship to changes in the operating environment (such as technical change, antitrust, or trade policy). Productivity analysis also includes the study of both the efficiency of production and technological change”
World Bank: Global Productivity, Trends, Drivers and Policies 2021
The World Bank has recently published a comprehensive survey of global productivity trends, key drivers of productivity and policies to improve productivity. The book on its web page also provides a dataset of multiple measures of productivity for 164 high income economies and emerging market and developing economies including South Africa. It also provides a new sectoral database of productivity. The book and databases can be accessed here: https://www.worldbank.org/en/research/publication/global-productivity
The World Bank has also published a book on productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa: Boosting Productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa : Policies and Institutions to Promote Efficiency 2021. The Introduction states:
“This book documents the productivity trends in Sub-Saharan Africa in three different dimensions, assessing productivity at the aggregate level, the sectoral level, and the establishment level. It characterizes the evolution of productivity in the region relative to other countries and regions, as well as country groups in Africa, classified by their degree of natural resource abundance and condition of fragility. The volume suggests that the persistence of the productivity gap in Africa vis-à-vis the technological frontier can be attributed to the slow accumulation of physical and human capital relative to the region’s growing population, as well as the poor allocation of these resources. These allocative inefficiencies are the outcome of policies and institutions that introduce distortions in the decision-making process of individuals.”
The book can be accessed here: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/36786
Chad Syverson, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, is a leading researcher on firm productivity, firm organisation and market structures. An excellent and much cited academic paper is his “What Determines Productivity?” (Chad Syverson; Journal of Economic Literature, 2011, 49(2), pp. 326-65). It can be accessed at the University of Chicago website here:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/jel.49.2.326
Syverson and his co-author Jan De Loecker have recently written a survey of productivity research from an industrial organisation perspective. It can be accessed here:
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29229/w29229.pdf