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October 1985, Vol.
108, No.
10
Productivity trends
in the Federal Government
Labor productivity continues to be a major concern in the U.S. economy. The Federal Government is no exception.1 It employs roughly 5.1 million people (2.9 million civilians and 2.2 million military).
For a number of years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has collected data from selected Federal agencies and computed productivity indexes.2 These indexes now cover 16 years, 54 Federal agencies employing 1.9 million Federal civilian employees, 401 reporting organizations, and about 3,000 different output measures. This article reports some of the results of these data.
This excerpt is from an article published in the October 1985 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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1 Management of U.S. Government, Fiscal 1986 (Government Printing Office, 1985).
2 For a discussion of past results and measurement concepts, see Joint Economic Committee, Hearings: Federal Productivity (Government Printing Office, 1974); Charles W. Ardolini, "Federal Sector Productivity Measurement," Selected Papers from North American Conference on Labor Statistics, May 1980, pp. 49-60; Jerome A. Mark, "Measuring Federal Productivity," Civil Service Journal, January-March 1979, pp. 20-23; Charles W. Ardolini and Jeffrey Hohenstein, "Measuring Productivity in the Federal Government," Monthly Labor Review, November 1974, pp. 13-20; Joint Economic Committee, Measuring and Enhancing Productivity in the Federal Sector (Government Printing Office, 1972); "Productivity Measures: Industries and the Federal Government," BLS Handbook of Methods, Bulletin 2134-1 (Government Printing Office, 1982).
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