Productivity Growth and Economic Performance

JOHN MCCOMBIE is Fellow in Economics at Downing College and a member of the University of Cambridge. His main research interests are economics growth, Keynesian economics and regional economics. He is the co-author (with A.P. Thirlwall) of Economic Growth and Balance-of-Payments Constraint. - MAURIZIO PUGNO is Professor of Economics at the University of Trento in Italy and was awarded an M.Phil. in Economics at Cambridge University in 1980. He has published several articles, both theoretical and empirical, on economic growth, structural change and trade cycle. He has also published a book on Harrod. - BRUNO SORO is Associate Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Genoa, Italy. His main research interests are on the areas of applied economics, growth and development, regional and international economics. He took part in the Research Unit ISTAT-University of Genoa that reconstructed the annual series of the Input-Output tables for the Italian economy 1980-95. -

• Introduction; J.McCombie, M.Pugno & B.Soro Factors that Determine the Growth of Labour Productivity: P.J.Verdoorn (Translation by A.P. Thirlwall ) 'Fattori che Regolano lo Sviluppo della Produttivita del Lavoro': Fifty Years On; B.Soro Increasing Returns and Economic Growth from a Kaldorian Perspective; J.McCombie A Reappraisal of Verdoorn's Law for the Italian Economy 1957-1997; C.Bianchi The Verdoorn Law: Some Evidence from Non-Parametric Frontier Analysis; S.Destefanis Productivity Growth and Unemployment: Does a Trade-off Exist?; M.Roberts Cumulative Causation and the Catching-up Debate from a Disequilibrium Standpoint; M.A.Leon-Ledesma Verdoorn's Law: Some Notes on Output Measurement and the Role of Demand; G.Rampa Verdoorn's Law and the Analysis of Steady State Growth: From an Unsatisfactory Marriage to a New Perspective; M.Pugno References Index