Passage 1 Secret Sauce
综合劳力生产力 《经济学人》

 

[00:00]Productivity growth is perhaps the single most important gauge of an economy's health.
[00:08]Unfortunately, productivity growth is itself often inefficiently measured.
[00:15]Most analysts focus on labor productivity,
[00:19]which is usually calculated by dividing total output by the number of workers,
[00:26]or the number of hours worked. According to new figures published on November 5th,
[00:33]America's output per hour worked has increased by 4.3% over the past year,
[00:42]thanks to big job cuts. Even more impressive is China,
[00:48]where labor productivity has risen by 7-8%.
[00:54]The snag is that labor productivity is an incomplete gauge of efficiency.
[01:01]Firms can boost output per man-hour by investing more
[01:06]and equipping workers with better machinery.
[01:10]But once the extra capital spending is taken into account there may be little
[01:16]or no gain in overall economic efficiency. Part of the jump in America's labor productivity
[01:25]during the "new economy" era of the late 1990s reflected a rise in investment as a share of GDP.
[01:36]The huge increase in China's labor productivity in recent years
[01:42]is partly due to heavy investment rather than true efficiency gains.
[01:48]A better gauge of an economy's use of resources is "total factor productivity" (TFP),
[01:57]which tries to assess the efficiency with which both capital and labor are used.
[02:04]Once a country's labor force stops growing
[02:09]and an increasing capital stock causes the return on new investment to decline,
[02:16]TFP becomes the main source of future economic growth.
[02:23]Unfortunately TFP is much harder to measure than labor productivity.
[02:29]It is calculated as the percentage increase in output that is not accounted for by changes
[02:37]in the volume of inputs of capital and labor. So if the capital stock
[02:44]and the workforce both rise by 2% and output rises by 3%, TFP goes up by 1%.
[02:55]Measuring hours worked is fairly easy,
[02:58]but different ways of valuing a country's capital stock can produce different results.
[03:05]The OECD publishes figures for its rich-country members. These show that since 1990,
[03:15]average TFP growth has been remarkably similar in America, Japan, Germany, Britain and France,
[03:24]at around 1% a year. A recent report by Andrew Cates, an economist at UBS,
[03:35]attempts to estimate TFP growth in emerging economies over the past two decades.
[03:43]He calculates that China has had by far the fastest annual rate of TFP growth,
[03:51]at around 4%. Probably no other country in history has enjoyed such rapid efficiency gains.
[04:01]India and other Asian emerging economies have also enjoyed faster productivity growth
[04:08]than other developing or developed regions.