Aggregate hours worked per working-age person decreased in Austria by 25% from 1970 to 2005. During the same time period, taxes increased, particularly the effective marginal tax rate on labor income. Using a standard general equilibrium growth model with taxes, I quantitatively assess the role played by the evolution of taxes in the evolution of hours worked in Austria. The model accounts for 76% of the observed decrease in hours worked per working-age person. My results are in line with other studies, which find taxes play an important role in explaining aggregate hours worked.

This paper measures the direct contribution of railways to economic growth before 1914 in four Latin American economies with large railway systems (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Uruguay) using growth accounting techniques. The outcomes of the analysis indicate that the growth contribution of railways in Uruguay was very low. By contrast, in Argentina and Mexico railways provided huge benefits, amounting to 20-25% of income per capita growth before 1914. Finally, in Brazil, the growth contribution of railways was even higher, although this was largely a consequence of the stagnation of the Brazilian economy. These results provide an example of a technology whose growth contribution was much higher in some peripheral economies than in the core countries where it was developed.

This paper reviews the analysis of technological change by cliometricians. It focuses on lessons about total factor productivity (TFP) from growth accounting and on aspects of social capability that are conducive to the effective assimilation of new technology. Key messages are that when TFP growth is very rapid this typically involves reductions in inefficiency not just technological advance and that even really important new technologies have small initial effects on aggregate productivity. Incentive structures matter greatly for the adoption of new technology, but social capability is not independent of the technological epoch as the information and communications technology (ICT) era has emphasized to Europeans.

Since joining the European Union in 1986, the performance of the Spanish economy has been quite remarkable, acting as a good example for new entrants of what can be accomplished in twenty years. Its ability to generate employment has been astonishing. Departing from an environment of very high unemployment (close to 25 per cent), Spain has become the country of destination most preferred by immigrants. However, it has also had a scant productivity performance. The main burden on productivity growth lies with the construction sector and almost all private service sectors with the unique exception of the financial sector. Most likely, over the next years, the continuity of the Spanish success will require a reversal of the sources of growth, shifting from labour creation to improvements in multifactor productivity.

This paper gives an overview of the construction of and preliminary results from the EU KLEMS database which contains industry estimates of output, input and productivity growth for EU countries. The paper begins with a discussion of methodology and data sources covering output and intermediates, capital and labour services. The content and scope of the database is then briefly described. This is followed by a discussion of preliminary results focusing on comparisons between the EU and US. These confirm the relatively poor productivity performance of the EU relative to the US since the mid-1990s, mostly driven by low productivity growth in market services.

This paper uses Growth Accounting and Production Function Analysis to decompose the factors behind differences in growth between the UK, France and Germany between 1992 and 2005. Most of the growth differential between the United Kingdom, Germany and France since 1993 can be explained by structural factors. The United Kingdom's higher growth has originated essentially in the finance and business sector, which is ICT-intensive. Germany's weak growth reflects in large part the aftermath of the unification shock and a continued fall in the labour input. At the same time there has been a sharp slowdown in knowledge accumulation, which seems to have restrained labour productivity growth. After EMU, the performance of German manufacturing improved relative to both France and the United Kingdom, while capital deepening became less supportive to growth because of lower investment in infrastructures and dwellings. France's higher growth relative to Germany since 1999 comes essentially from the non-tradable sectors and from a higher labour input. This may be partly related to a more significant decline in the volatility of real interest rates.

New U.S. evidence from NIPA contradicts some of the well-known Kaldor stylized facts, and call for a reformulation of the modern theory of economic growth. Among these new facts, two must be stressed: A permanent decline in the relative price of durable goods, and a permanent increase in the real equipment to real GDP ratio. To be consistent with these new facts, growth models must include at least two sectors and address the problem of defining aggregate output. In this paper, the economic theory of index numbers is used to define the growth rate of real output in a growth model with embodied technical change. The main findings are: (i) NIPA’s methodology measures growth in accordance with the economic theory on index numbers, and (ii) when the growth rate is measured as in NIPA, the contribution of embodied technical change to per capital GDP growth in the U.S. is 69%, which reinforce the claim that embodied technical change is important for growth.