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International Comparisons of Productivity
A detailed discussion of the issues surrounding the International Comparisons of Productivity system underlying the figures released on the National Statistics website on the 17th of October.
This paper contains a detailed discussion of the issues surrounding the international comparisons of productivity system underlying the figures released on the National Statistics website on the 17th of October. The original system of international comparisons of productivity was developed by the DTI and is set out by Harley and Owen in their 1998 Economic Trends paper. However, recent work by the ONS suggests that there are short-comings in this system, notably in the treatment of actual hours worked and the source of the employment numbers used. Since the OECD have improved the comparability of their data series the ONS and DTI have agreed to switch to using straight OECD data. Revisions to the numbers previously published by the DTI are caused both by changes to the sources used for these numbers, and from revisions to published OECD series already in use.
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