nowEurope

I just read interesting news about development of productivity during 2005 - the ten new EU member states in Central and Eastern Europe delivered a spectacular acceleration in labour productivity growth in 2005 according to The Conference Board’s annual analysis of global productivity trends, Performance 2006: Productivity, Employment and Income in the World’s Economies. On average, the EU’s new member states EU-10 increased labour productivity growth rate from 4.1% in 2004 to 6.2% in 2005. Most of the EU-10 showed an improvement in productivity growth but Poland (from 4.1 to 7.7%), Hungary (from 3.7 to 6.3%) and Slovakia (from 3.9 to 5.5%) registered the most marked increases. Remarkably, Poland’s productivity level is now higher than South Korea’s.

In contrast, most countries in the developed world, including North America, Western Europe and developed Asia experienced a slowdown in productivity growth in 2005 with rates in the 1.5 to 2% range. Productivity growth in the EU-15 dipped from 1.4% in 2004 to 0.5% in 2005 caused in part by a sharp fall in productivity gains in major economies such as the UK (which declined from 2.3 in 2004 to 0.9% in 2005) and continued slow growth in Germany (at 0.9%).