Suchergebnisse

Official statistics suggest that over the last two decades the commercial service sector has grown rapidly both in absolute terms and relative to the rest of the British economy. Given the importance of service activities, and the fact that many of them are notoriously difficult to quantify, it is desirable that the reliability of service output measures be subject to scrutiny and, where possible, improvement. Accordingly this article presents some alternative output measures which have been compiled for financial, recreational and catering services, and compares the picture which emerges, for the economy as a whole and for individual service industries, with, that portrayed by official data.

Reliable measures of the gross replacement cost of fixed assets are needed for a variety of reasons. It is generally accepted that this is the valuation concept which is most appropriate for assessing the output capacity of capital and for analysing developments over time in output, labour force and capital stock relationships. The gross replacement cost of fixed assets is also the benchmark for deriving measures of net capital stock which, taken in conjunction with other capital elements and profit data, yield rates of return to capital. Furthermore it is the concept which constitutes the fundamental ingredient in the quantification of the depreciation allowances that are used in national accounts.

The National Institute recently published a study of comparative labour productivity in the non-service sectors of the British, American and German economies: agriculture, extractive industries, manufacturing, construction, public utilities and transport and communications. The present paper extends this work by measuring and analysing Anglo-American labour productivity differentials in the retail trades. Thus it marks our first step into the service sector proper, which accounts in the United Kingdom for one half of both GDP and employment, and in the United States for nearly three-fifths. The extent and significance of international productivity differences in services have been almost entirely neglected in the past, largely because the technical problems posed by productivity measurement in service sectors are even more complex than those encountered in industrial activities. One exception was a study of comparative productivity in distribution relating to the beginning of the 1950s, the methodology of which is similar to our own.

This paper presents some results derived from a wider National Institute study of labour productivity differentials in non-service activities in the British, American and German economies, to be published as a NIESR Occasional Paper during the autumn 1982. For the most part the present paper focuses on the international labour productivity differentials which emerge at the major sector level—for agriculture, extractive industries, manufacturing, construction, public utilities and transport. The complete study will also consider productivity differentials for component activities in these sectors and seek some explanation of contrasts in international industrial performance in terms of such factors as capital intensity, market size, rates of growth, labour force quality etc.