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Productivity and Competitiveness
BERR is working to create the conditions for business success and help the UK respond to the challenge of globalisation. Globalisation and the accompanying intensification of competitive pressures are rapidly changing the context in which UK business operates. Business and Government must respond to globalisation by boosting our competitiveness, and that means raising our productivity.
Higher productivity means higher wages, higher profits and better public services. So it should also be noted that improving UK productivity performance will be the main source of future improvements in UK living standards.
The Government has identified five drivers of productivity: investment, innovation, skills, enterprise and competition. A wide-ranging programme of reforms has been initiated to boost productivity through the five drivers, including many which work across the five drivers, exploiting synergies between them.
The Indicators
The UK Productivity and Competitiveness Indicators sets out the Government approach to measuring competitiveness. The Indicators benchmark UK performance on each of the five drivers of productivity.
The new, focused set of Indicators was chosen following a consultation in 2004. More information on this new focussed set of Indicators and how the Government uses it as an important part of a wider evidence base to understand UK productivity performance and hence formulate policy, can be found in the Government's response to the 2004 consultation (see external links). Both BERR and HM Treasury (HMT) will continue to make this evidence base publicly available through the publication of BERR Economics Papers and the joint HMT/BERR 'Productivity in the UK' series (see external links).
You will find a link below to the latest assessment of the Indicators, published in April 2006. This includes an assessment of overall UK productivity performance, as well as the performance on each driver and an outline of the policy context on each driver. You will also find a link below to the latest Indicators data, which is updated regularly.
Analysis
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Further analysis of productivity and competitiveness issues can be found in the Main Economics Paper Series.
Data
All the Indicators data, as described in the latest report (Economics Paper No.17), is available on the BERR Statistics website link below. This includes data on the UK's relative performance in investment, innovation, skills, enterprise and competition, as well as past assessments of the UK Productivity and Competitiveness Indicators.
Productivity and Competitiveness Indicators data
External links
The External Links section on the right-hand side includes links to the HM Treasury productivity pages (who share overall policy responsibility for improving UK productivity performance with BERR); to the Office for National Statistics productivity pages (who provide much of the data for our evidence base on understanding productivity); to the OECD productivity pages (the OECD do a lot of work to produce internationally-comparable measure of productivity and its drivers); and to the European Commission series on competitiveness and benchmarking.
Contact
Richard Notley
Tel: 020 7215 6375
E-mail: richard.notley@berr.gsi.gov.uk