Posted by John Irons at November 13, 1997 03:17 PM

The US Labor Department Thursday announced that the revised third quarter productivity growth (SAAR) was 4.5%. This is very good news for the economy. While news reports do a good job of announcing the latest numbers, they often fail to provide a historical context in which to evaluate the information.

Below is a graph of US non-farm productivity going back to 1948. As you can see, productivity growth was strong just after WWII and remained relatively strong until the early 70's when it began to dip. We've seen growth at the current level for only two quarters in the past ten years.

Hopefully the strength in productivity growth (2.5% over the past year, and 4.5% in the third quarter) will continue to build.

Where to go for Productivity Data?

The productivity data for the US can be found at the Quarterly Labor Productivity Home Page from the Department of Labor. For data from other countries take a look at the OECD web site for many of the basic series including the national accounts and related data. Stat-USA has data from many government data series on-line for registered subscribers and the NIPA Visualization Page also has a number of series as well.

Other parts of this site have more resources on economic data and government agencies.

Future

This is the point where most commentators take a leap into the unknown by predicting how the economy will do in the future. Some say that good times are ahead in the "new economy" as new technologies will drive us to a new era of growth. Some predict gloom and doom or claim recession lies ahead because of global competition, runaway entitlements, or even the year 2000 problem.

I won't bother to leave myself open for error, at least not today.

When all is said and done, productivity growth is perhaps the most important gauge of the performance of the economy. Let's hope that the strong growth continues.

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