Priorities and Directions for Future Productivity Research: A BEA Perspective

This article identifies hard-to-measure services, land/ natural resources, and factory-less goods manufacturing as three priority areas for productivity research. It highlights three hard-to-measure sectors for special attention: health, education, and financial services, given the difficulty of measuring prices and output in these sectors. It also argues that with the increased attention to the environment it has become increasing important to incorporate land and natural resources into the production function. Finally, it points out that the classification issues associated with factory-less goods producers have implications for the measurement of inputs and outputs at the sectoral level and hence for productivity estimates.