Productivity underpins business success and national well-being and thus it is crucial to understand the factors that influence productivity growth. This volume provides a comprehensive exploration into the significance of productivity growth for business, the economy, and for social economic progress. It examines how productivity is defined, measured and implemented. It also surveys the dispersion of productivity across time and place, focusing on the productivity dynamics that either leads to a reallocation of resources that reduces dispersion and increases aggregate productivity or, conversely, allows dispersion to persist behind barriers to productivity-enhancing reallocation. A third focus is an investigation of the drivers of, or impediments to, productivity growth, some of which are organizational in nature and under management control and others of which are institutional in nature and subject to public policy intervention.

The Oxford Handbook of Productivity Analysis contains contributions of distinguished productivity experts from around the world who analyze a wide range of timely issues. These issues concern purely analytical topics surrounding the measurement of productivity in various situations, beginning with the ideal situation in which all inputs and all outputs, and their prices, are observed accurately. They also include service sectors such as education in which the services provided are hard to define, much less measure, and other sectors that generate undesirable environmental externalities that are difficult to price and complicate the very definition of productivity. The issues also involve business management topics ranging from the role of business models and benchmarking to the quality of management practices, the adoption of new technologies, and possible complementarities between the two. The relationship between productivity and business performance is also explored. At a more aggregate level the issues range from the impacts of market power, incentive regulation, international trade and global value chains on productivity, to the contribution of productivity to economic development and economic welfare.

Emili Grifell-Tatjé is currently Professor of Management and Business Economics in the Department of Business at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He has published in a wide range of academic journals in the fields of economics and business, a book for Cambridge University Press, and lectured around the world on a range of business and productivity issues.

C. A. Knox Lovell is Honorary Professor, School of Economics, University of Queensland. He has authored four books and edited seven books, authored over 100 journal articles, served as Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Productivity Analysis and on editorial boards of several other journals, and lectured around the world on a range of productivity issues.

Robin C. Sickles is the Reginald Henry Hargrove Chair of Economics and is a Professor of Statistics at Rice University. He has written over 90 peer-reviewed articles, 25 book chapters, and has written and edited nine books and special journal issues. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Productivity Analysis and on editorial boards of Journal of Applied Econometrics, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Communications in Statistics, Empirical Economics, and Journal of Econometrics.