Over the past 60 years, real manufacturing output per worker has nearly quadrupled.
In future China will have many fewer workers for each person in retirement, yet also much more output per worker.
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Workers benefit from more output per worker, not more workers per task.
Output per worker per hour grew at an annual pace of 9.4% in the third quarter, the fastest rate for 20 years.
According to McKinsey, this local protectionism is the largest reason for the low productivity of Japanese retailing, with output per worker half the U.S. level.
With sales falling faster than employment, output per worker goes down.
Then output per worker would have grown 0.2 percentage points a year faster in British businesses and 0.5 points faster in America, Finland and Sweden.
Developing countries that open their stock markets to foreign investors reap big benefits: output per worker grows by 2.3 percentage points faster than it would have done otherwise.
The result is that, although output per worker rises only slowly or not at all, wages go up as fast as they do in the rest of the economy.
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When you measure productivity in terms of output per hour worked, instead of output per worker, these ONS numbers show that our productivity growth has not been very different from other European countries.
In effect, that is what you have had in the US, where output per worker has jumped by five percentage points since 2007, at the same time as national output (GDP) has risen by only one percentage point.
U.S. manufacturers now produce three and a half times more output per worker hour than they did in the peak employment year of 1979, in part because offshoring has sent many low-value jobs overseas, but also because automation has replaced lots of factory jobs.
In the three countries in the study where human capital improved the fastest between the older and the younger generations (Belgium, Finland and Italy), growth in output per worker rose much faster than average between 1960 and 1995, while in those with least improvement in skills (New Zealand, Sweden and the United States), growth was slower.
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