Productivity -- Picking Up?
OVER THE PAST two centuries, in all of the worldÛªs rich countries, labor has been moving out of agriculture into industry.</br></br>Food production hasnÛªt fallen, because farmers' productivity has steadily risen. It has freed people for other kinds of work, making these economies grow and raising everybodyÛªs standard of living.</br></br>Now the same process is overtaking manufacturing. Within the past decade or so, in most of the industrial countries, employment in manufacturing has been failing. But with only one exception, Great Britain, manufacturing output has continued to rise throughout the industrial democracies. Productivity is increasing, and labor is shifting from factories to services. It will be useful to keep this process in mind when legislation on competitiveness and trade protection begins to move through Congress. People in Congress often talk as though the number of jobs in manufacturing were the true measure of industrial strength. That's wrong. As factories learn to produce more goods with fewer people,*prosperity rises.</br></br>But there are sharp variations from one country to another. The Labor Department has just published figures on manufacturing productivity through 1985 for most of the advanced countries.</br></br>Over those years the world's fastest gains in manufacturing productivity were not in Japan but in Belgium, where, it doubled. Factory jobs there fell by more than one third, while output rose 20 percent. Japan's productivity gain was nearly as great as Belgium's, and since manufacturing jobs there held steady, output nearly doubled as well.