A time series analysis of labor productivity. Italy versus the European countries and the US

This paper aims at analyzing labor productivity per hour worked in the manufacturing industries of four industrialized countries, Germany, France, Italy and the U.S., between 1950 and 2010. It uses the common trends - common cycles approach to decompose series into trends and cycles. We find that the four national manufacturing sectors share three common trends and one common cycle. Further, we show that trend and cycle innovations have a negative relationship that supports the 'opportunity cost' approach to productivity growth. Finally, trend innovations are generally larger that cycle innovations, with the exception of Italy. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.