Department of Labor Logo United States Department of Labor
Dot gov

The .gov means it's official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you're on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Factory productivity in the G-7 countries: 1950-2000

September 11, 2002

Over the course of the last half of the 20th century, labor productivity in the manufacturing sector increased less in the U.S. than in the other G-7 countries—Canada, Japan, and G-4 Europe (France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom).

Labor productivity growth in manufacturing, United States,Canada, Japan, and Europe (G4), selected periods, 1990-2000
[Chart data—TXT]

However, the slower overall growth in U.S. productivity is largely attributable to the pre-1973 period. After 1973, growth in U.S. productivity continued and even accelerated, whereas productivity growth slowed in most other countries.

The U.S. productivity growth rate was relatively stable over the different time periods and reached its maximum in the 1990s. The remaining G-7 countries, however, experienced their highest rates of productivity increases during the pre-1973 period, followed by considerably lower rates of growth in subsequent years. The one exception was the United Kingdom, where productivity growth remained relatively stable over the entire 50-year period.

These data are a product of the BLS Foreign Labor Statistics program. Find out more in "Comparing 50 years of labor productivity in U.S. and foreign manufacturing," by Aaron E. Cobet and Gregory A. Wilson, Monthly Labor Review, June 2002.

SUGGESTED CITATION

Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, The Economics Daily, Factory productivity in the G-7 countries: 1950-2000 at https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2002/sept/wk2/art03.htm (visited October 15, 2024).

OF INTEREST
spotlight
Recent editions of Spotlight on Statistics


triangle