Multifactor productivity: a new BLS measure, (EXCERPT), Monthly Labor Review Online, December 1983

Multifactor productivity:
a new BLS measure

Jerome A. Mark and William H. Waldorf

The Bureau of Labor Statistics now publishes three measures of productivity: (1) the familiar index of labor productivity, which relates output to hours of all persons involved in the production process; (2) a new index of capital productivity, which relates output to capital inputs; and (3) a new index of multifactor productivity, which relates output to inputs of labor and capital.

The new annual measures help explain that, between 1948 and 1981, when private business sector output grew by 3.4 percent annually, the growth was due about equally to increases in labor and capital inputs (such as hours of all persons and plant and equipment) and to more productive use of these resources, as measured by multifactor productivity.

This article reports on the development of the multifactor and capital productivity measures and shows how the new measures can be used to analyze the long-term trend and the post-1973 productivity slowdown.

This excerpt is from an article published in the December 1983 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.

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