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Productivity and business dynamism

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Why has productivity growth slowed in advanced economies? This question has vexed policymakers around the world due to the critical link between productivity, economic growth, and living standards.  As governments and private actors seek to improve the performance of firms while promoting both social and environmental well-being, it is important to understand the links between policy and productivity, inclusiveness and innovation.

To address this core economic and social question, the OECD’s Science, Technology and Innovation Directorate has embarked on a series of projects which draw on highly-disaggregated data across a wide range of countries.  Firm-level data on employment and productivity, innovation and R&D has been harmonised across countries and over time, thus enabling comparative analyses and providing insights into the role of domestic policy settings, technological progress, and industry structure.

  

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MultiProd uses firm-level data collected from over 20 countries to understand the micro-drivers of aggregate productivity. By utilising information on productivity growth and dispersion across highly disaggregated groups of firms, this project has shed light on the role of technology and policy settings in explaining concentration and productivity catch-up. DynEmp uses microdata on employment dynamics from highly representative national sources, such as national business and social security registers. It provides new evidence on business dynamics, including the role of new and established firms across different size groups, particularly with respect to job creation and destruction and firm entry and exit.
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The Global Forum on Productivity (GFP) aims to foster international co-operation between public bodies with responsibility for promoting productivity-enhancing policies. The GFP provides a platform on which participants will convene to exchange information and discuss best practices as well as a framework within which to undertake productivity analysis that is complementary to the OECD’s regular work programme.  

 

Related

 

Icon for Metadata. Icon made by Flat Icons from www.flaticon.com. DynEmp and MultiProd: Metadata (2019), comprehensive metadata for DynEmp and MultiProd, also presenting an overall description of both projects, the methodologies used for data collection, the main features of the data by country and further country-specific information.
 Icon of a terrestrial globe. Icon made by turkkurt from www.flaticon.com OECD Insights on Productivity and Business Dynamics, a series of country profiles with a focus on the micro drivers of aggregate productivity and job creation. This series, and related in-depth country studies, use data from DynEmp and MultiProd alongside existing research and analysis to examine key features of the profiled countries and identify policy priorities.
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Industry concentration measures, a dataset describing the share of the largest groups in industry sales (by country, A64 industry and year).

Indicators on the link between intangible investment and productivity dispersion.