OECD Compendium of Productivity Indicators 2016
The publication presents a comprehensive overview of recent and longer term trends in productivity levels and growth in OECD and some G20 countries. The statistics presented include measures of labour productivity, capital productivity and multifactor productivity, as well as indicators of international competitiveness.
Trends
Understanding to which extent productivity growth is driven by structural factors and affected by short-term economic fluctuations is of utmost importance for policy makers. To shed light on this distinction, one can decompose the series into a trend and a cyclical component, where the trend is meant to capture the long-term growth of the series and the cyclical component is the deviation of the series from that trend. In the OECD Compendium of Productivity Indicators 2015, the method used to extract the trend component is the Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter (Hodrick and Prescott, 1997).