Productivity and Growth over the Years at BPEA

Over the past fifty years BPEA authors have written extensively about both domestic US productivity growth and international sources of growth differences in rich and poor countries. This paper summarizes and evaluates five BPEA papers on US productivity growth that focus primarily on the sources of the post-1965 growth slowdown and post-1995 growth revival. Then three papers are reviewed on international growth differences, highlighting the difficulties of empirically determining the sources of growth and the competing roles in growth outcomes of structural factors like geography and demography versus policy and governmental issues, including legal systems, property rights, and absence of corruption.