Capital services grew by 1.8 percent and labor input—which is the combined effect of hours worked and labor composition—grew by 2.1 percent. Capital services per hour of all persons decreased at a rate of 0.1 percent in 2012 after falling 1.2 percent in 2011. The decreases in 2011 and 2012 are the only two years of decline in the measure which began in 1987.
Multifactor productivity in the private business sector also grew by 0.9 percent in 2012. A 2.8-percent increase in output and a 2.0-percent increase in the combined inputs of capital and labor contributed to the gain.
These data are from the Multifactor Productivity program. To learn more, see “Preliminary Multifactor Productivity Trends — 2012,” news release USDL‑13‑1245 (HTML) (PDF). Multifactor productivity measures the change in output per unit of combined capital and labor input. It is designed to measure the joint influences of technological change, efficiency improvements, returns to scale, reallocation of resources, and other factors on economic growth, allowing for the effects of capital and labor.
United States Department of Labor
