Productivity growth is the most important gauge of an economy’s long-run health. Nothing is more critical in determining living standards over the long run than improvements in the efficiency with which an economy combines its inputs of capital and labor. Most economists focus on labor productivity, which is an incomplete gauge of efficiency because firms can boost output per man-hour by investing more and equipping workers with better machinery. A better gauge of an economy’s use of resources is “total factor productivity” (TFP), which assesses the efficiency with which both capital and labor are used. Once a nation’s labor force stops growing and an increasing capital stock causes the return on new investment to decline, TFP becomes the main source of economic growth.
The illusion of sustainable growth was not only limited to the command economies. The unusually rapid and protracted growth in the then newly industrialized economies (NIEs) of East Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) from the 1960s until the 1980s led to the widespread belief that productivity growth in these economies, especially in their manufacturing sectors, had been extraordinarily high. But seminal research[4] showed that the NIEs’ economic growth was mainly due to factor accumulation and the sectoral reallocation of resources.
All four economies had experienced sizable increases in their labor force participation, leading to natural increases in output per capita, or average living standards. In particular, however, they had been rapidly accumulating capital, leading to more capital per worker, and in turn, higher labor productivity. Unlike the command economies of the Communist era, however, factor accumulation in the four NIEs contributed substantially to growth because these economies on the whole allowed the increasing amounts of labor and capital to move from the less productive sectors to the more productive ones. It is this factor accumulation, combined with eventual gains in productivity, which allowed them to escape the MIT.
Japan’s dismal rate of economic growth over the past two decades is largely the result of lackluster productivity increases. (According to the Conference Board, TFP growth averaged only 0.5 percent between 2000 and 2013.[5]) As its post–World War II rate of factor accumulation began slowing down, particularly capital accumulation, so did its overall rate of growth.
Part of the jump in America’s labor productivity during the “new economy” era of the late 1990s reflected a sharp rise in domestic investment as a share of GDP (that is, capital accumulation). As this investment share returned to historically normal levels last decade, so did U.S. real GDP growth.
This Special Report explores the root causes of the MIT and offers policy recommendations on how developing countries can avoid it. The MIT issue is most critical today because there are now 55 developing countries in the upper-middle-income range with combined populations of over two billion.[6] This Special Report focuses on four nations in Southeast Asia—Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam—because these have been some of the fastest growing since the turn of the millennium, and at least for now, appear resistant to the MIT.[7]