Innovation, research, and the UK’s productivity crisis – part 3

This the third and final in a series of three posts. The first part is here, and this follows on directly from part 2

(Added 2/9/2015: For those who dislike the 3-part blog format, the whole article can be downloaded as a PDF here: Innovation, research and development, and the UK’s productivity crisis).

Quantifying the productivity benefits of research and development

The UK’s productivity problem is an innovation problem. This conclusion follows from the analysis of Goodridge, Haskel and Wallis, at least if one equates the economist’s construction of total factor productivity with innovation. This needs some qualification, because when economists talk about innovation in this context they mean anything that allows one to produce more economic output with the same inputs of labour and capital. So this can result from the development of new high value products or new, better processes to make existing products. Such developments are often, but not always, the result of formal research and development.

But there are many other types of innovation. People continually work out better ways of doing things, either as a result of formal training or simply by learning from experience, they act on suggestions from users, they copy better practises from competitors, they see new technologies in action in other sectors and apply them in their own, they work out more effective ways of organising and distributing their work; all these lead to total factor productivity growth and count as innovation in this sense.

There has been a tendency to underplay the importance of formal research and development in recent thinking about innovation, particularly in the UK. Continue reading “Innovation, research, and the UK’s productivity crisis – part 3”

Innovation, research, and the UK’s productivity crisis – part 2

This the second in a series of three posts, and continues directly from part 1.

Analysing the UK’s productivity slow-down

There are many theories of why the UK’s productivity growth has stalled, and in the absence of proper analysis it’s all too easy to chose a favoured hypothesis on the basis of anecdotes or a single data point, picked out to fit one’s ideological predilections. Indeed, I could be accused of doing just that, by drawing attention the UK’s weak R&D record; others might immediately start looking at a lack of competitiveness in the economy, or insufficient deregulation, as the root of the issue. But it would be surprising if such a striking occurrence had just a single cause, so a more careful analysis should help us not just by ruling possible causes in or out, but by ascribing different weights to multiple causes.

A better analysis needs both to consider what we mean by productivity and its different causes in more detail, and to look at the economy on a finer scale, looking both at the productivity performance of different sectors and the balance in the economy between those different sectors. Continue reading “Innovation, research, and the UK’s productivity crisis – part 2”

Innovation, research and development, and the UK’s productivity crisis – part 1

This is the first of a series of three posts in which I bring together some thinking and reading I’ve been doing about the UK’s current productivity problem, and its relationship to innovation and to research and development.

(Added 2/9/2015: For those who dislike the 3-part blog format, the whole article can be downloaded as a PDF here: Innovation, research and development, and the UK’s productivity crisis)

In part 1, here, I take stock of the scale of the UK’s productivity problem and discuss why it matters so much, both economically and politically. Then I’ll set the context for the following discussion with a provocative association between productivity growth and R&D intensity.

In part 2, I’ll review what can be said with more careful analyses of productivity, looking at the performance of individual sectors and testing some more detailed explanations of the productivity slowdown. I’ll pick out the role of declining North Sea oil and gas and the end of the financial services bubble in the UK’s poor recent performance; these don’t explain all the problem, but they will provide a headwind that the economy will have to overcome over the coming years.

Finally in part 3 I’ll return to a more detailed discussion of innovation in general and the particular role of R&D, finishing with some thoughts about what should be done about the problem.

The scale of the UK’s productivity problem

The UK’s current stalling of productivity growth is probably the UK’s most serious current economic problem. In terms of output per hour, the last five years’ productivity performance has been by far the worst period in the last 45 years. Many other developed economies have had disappointing productivity growth in recent years, but the UK’s record is particularly bad. Amongst other developed economics, only Luxembourg and Greece have done worse since 2007, according to a recent OECD report on the future of productivity (see table A2, p83).

labourproductivity
Labour productivity since 1970. The fit is an exponential corresponding to constant growth of 2.3% a year. ONS data.

My plot shows the UK’s labour productivity – defined as the GDP generated per hour worked – since 1971. Continue reading “Innovation, research and development, and the UK’s productivity crisis – part 1”

I chose to graduate

I’m sure there are some people who, very early on in their lives, work out what they want to do and then set out single-mindedly to achieve their aims. For the rest of us, choices are made and paths are set without us really being conscious of those junctions, so we look back and wonder how was it that our lives unfolded in this way and not in another. And yet, looking back, we sometimes can see moments, or short periods, that were decisive in setting us down one path and cutting off other possibilities. For me, the summer of 1982 was the time that determined that I was going to end up being a scientist, and to some extent what sort of scientist I would end up being, though I don’t suppose at any moment at the time I had any idea that this was the case.

Mont Blanc du Tacul

The East Face of Mont Blanc du Tacul, a 4,248 m peak in the French Alps

It began on the bus to Chamonix, in the French Alps, in the summer vacation after my second year at University. Continue reading “I chose to graduate”