But the consultants reckon that much of Brazil's productivity gap is fairly easy to bridge.
Chrysler hopes the new factory prototype will help it close the productivity gap with companies like Toyota.
McKinsey reckons that better organisation and lay-out of factories could shave another 35% off the productivity gap.
But unlike in information technology, China has not actually closed the productivity gap with the United States.
This is a good job: the productivity gap between Fiat's Italian factories and its foreign operations is astounding.
This will go some way to closing the 30% productivity gap between Birmingham and Munich, which has been aggravated by the strength of sterling.
McKinsey, like the government, thinks that there is something in this, and in other common explanations of Britain's productivity gap, such as failure to exploit economies of scale and a poorly skilled workforce.
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In fact, much of the productivity-growth gap is explained by different labour regulations.
And though our workers have caught up with German levels of productivity, the gap with America and France has scarcely budged.
If you look at the relationship between the increase in productivity in the American economy and the increase in compensation, what you find is that beginning around the 1980s, there was a widening gap between productivity and compensation.
Its Polish, Serbian and Turkish plants run at more than 70% of their capacity, whereas Italian ones run at 33%. (Part of the gap comes from lower productivity, part from Fiat choosing to make cars elsewhere and part from varying levels of demand).
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The FAO found that if resources were equalized, if male and female farmers could have equal access to resources, if that gender gap were closed, the productivity of farmers would be 20-30 percent higher and the output would feed 150 million more people.
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As in all productivity debates, the true size of this gap, the reasons for it and the implications are all hotly debated, but low investment is thought to be a prime culprit.
"Today's announcement isn't just about faster trains - high-speed rail will create up to 30, 000 station-supported jobs in Manchester and help to drive productivity in the region, bridging the economic gap between the North and the South, " he said.
We are not addressing the high valued added skill gap in the US. So, we are not providing high wage, high productivity, high valued added jobs, especially in the engineering and IT industries.
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To address this gap, the European business community has long called for a genuine framework that promotes innovation, productivity and entrepreneurialism.
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