May 02, 2008 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.)

Manufacturing multifactor productivity in 2006

Multifactor productivity in the manufacturing sector rose 1.6 percent in 2006.

[Chart data—TXT]

This is the fifth consecutive year that multifactor productivity rose in manufacturing.

The 2006 multifactor productivity gain reflected a 1.8-percent increase in sectoral output and a 0.3-percent increase in combined inputs.

Multifactor productivity is designed to measure the joint influences on economic growth of technological change, efficiency improvements, returns to scale, reallocation of resources, and other factors, allowing for the effects of capital, labor and, in the case of the manufacturing sector, intermediate inputs (energy, materials, purchased business services).

These data are from the BLS Multifactor Productivity program. Productivity data are subject to revision. To learn more, see "Multifactor Productivity Trends in Manufacturing, 2006," news release USDL 08-0587.