Productivity News

The 8th World KLEMS Conference will be held on March 27-28, 2025 in Tokyo. This is the second World KLEMS Conference in Tokyo, with the first one held in 2014. This conference is organized by Gakushuin University, Hitotsubashi University, and Research...

The new Economic Transformation Database of Transition Economies [ETD-TE] allows for analysis of the inter-industry structural change performance of the countries of the former Soviet Union for the first time. In the period 1990-2019 - the three decades...

Comparing productivity at the sectoral level requires estimates of relatives prices at the sectoral level. The 2023 edition of the Productivity Level Database provides the most comprehensive GGDC dataset to date, covering 84 countries and 12 sectors across...

The Productivity Institute recently published a new blog introducing the Penn World Table (PWT). Authored by Ryan Marapin, Robert Inklaar and Reitze Gouma, this blog showcases two example analyses that illustrate the potential of the PWT data set, along...

Last November 2022 the original EU KLEMS project website was taken offline. Since 2007 this website hosted the initial EU KLEMS project pages and all releases constructed between 2007 and 2018. The website has been archived in its entirety using the intern...

We have released a minor update of the Penn World Table, version 10.01. This update changes part of the calculation of investment prices and most notably impact capital growth. Details of this change have been documented in an updated 'what is new'...

Robert Inklaar, Daan Freeman and Erwin Diewert have won the 2021 Kendrick prize during the 37th IARIW General Conference held in August in Luxembourg. Their paper titled ‘Natural Resources and Missing Inputs in International Productivity Comparisons’ was...

On June 9th, The Economist featured research by John Fernald of INSEAD Business School and GGDC director Robert Inklaar. In their article 'The UK Productivity “Puzzle” in an International Comparative Perspective', they argue that most of Britain’s slowdown...

On May 26 The Economist featured an article on China's attempts to mitigate its exposure to Western influence, using data from the Penn World Table version 10.0.

The original website of the World Input-Output Database (WIOD), previously hosted at www.wiod.org, has been migrated to the GGDC website. An archived version of the original website is still available, but will no longer be updated. All information and...

On March 20th, The Economist featured research by the GGDC and UNU-WIDER on the manufacturing renaissance in Africa. A key finding is that the share of people working in manufacturing in sub-Saharan Africa has risen from 7.2% of the total in 2010 to 8.4%....

Today, we have launched version 10.0 of the Penn World Table. This version of the database covers 183 countries and the years from 1950 to 2019. We have incorporated the latest data from the International Comparison Program, led by the World Bank, which...

Following the appointment of Bart van Ark as director of the new Productivity Institute, he has been appointed as honorary professor at FEB to emphasise his continued engagement with the University of Groningen, see here for more details.

On September 1, Robert Inklaar has taken over as director of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC) from Marcel Timmer.

Today, version 9.1 of the Penn World Table has been released. The data can be downloaded from this page. This new version has the following features, described in more detail here:

As many of you have noticed and noted, we have not managed to meet our goal for publishing PWT 9.1 in late 2018. Providing a high-quality data release that meets the ambitions set out last summer, especially with regard to improved capital measurement. We...

At the latest General Conference of the International Association of Research in Income and Wealth, GGDC researchers contributed substantially to the program:

Robert Inklaar and Marcel Timmer published a paper in the AEA Papers and Proceedings on using online prices for comparisons of real consumption levels across countries (open access version here), jointly with Alberto Cavallo (HBS), Erwin Diewert (UBC) and ...

Work on a new version of the Penn World Table (PWT) is progressing and has advanced to the point where we can provide more information on the timing and content of this new release:

Marcel Timmer, Robert Inklaar and Jop Woltjer were amongst the presenters at the Fifth World KLEMS conference, organised by Dale Jorgenson and others at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government on June 4–5. Presentations included discussion of the...

On May 23, Thomas Piketty gave the Maddison lecture, on the topic of globalization and inequality. See here for some highlights and how Piketty's work relates to research of GGDC.

In the IMF's latest World Economic Outlook, its chapter 3 on manufacturing jobs relies heavily on data provided by the GGDC, including the World Input-Output Database and the GGDC Productivity Level Database, as well as relying on the data from the World...

On March 6, Robert Inklaar gave his inaugural lecture to officially accept his position of Professor in the Economics of Productivity and Welfare. In this lecture, he established how productivity growth in the 21st century has been low by historical...

Marcel Timmer and Robert Inklaar each organised a session at the 4th annual conference of the Society for Economic Measurement, at MIT, from July 26 to 28. The session by Marcel Timmer was on trade and global value chains and included presentations by Robe...

On July 1, Robert Inklaar was appointed Professor in the Economics of Productivity and Welfare at the University of Groningen. The main research objective of this new chair is to better understand how automation will affect not just economic activity, but...

On the (Dutch) Kennislink website, Robert Inklaar discusses how the spread of robots is a challenge for those with jobs involving routine tasks, yet embracing robots may be preferable to jobs disappearing overseas.

The Transatlantic Platform has awarded a Digging into Data grant of €375,000 to an international team of researchers, with the team for the Netherlands led by Robert Inklaar and also including Marcel Timmer. The grant is awarded for a project to use online...

Alan Heston, one of the original forces behind the International Comparison Program (ICP) and the Penn World Table has drafted a memoir of these major undertakings, which have transformed international economic statistics over the past half century. We...

Robert Inklaar lectures today at the European Investment Bank about Inequality and GDP. He will argue that our understanding of income differences across countries depends crucially on accurate and frequent comparisons of prices across countries as...

On June 28–30, we organise a conference to celebrate the 25 year anniversary of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC) in Het Kasteel in Groningen. The conference will feature many prominent speakers: Dale Jorgenson (Harvard) will give an...

GGDC researchers played several important roles at the recent General Conference of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth (IARIW), in Dresden. This biennial conference brings together academic researchers and official...

Thanks to helpful user queries, we have found two computation errors in the PWT 9.0 data that were released on June 9 2016:

The Economist uses data from the Penn World Table to illustrate how Vietnam's growth in GDP per capita over de past quarter century matches China's growth experience following its liberalizing reforms in the late 1970s.

The GGDC Summer School 2016 took place between July 11 and 15 and featured several lectures by Branko Milanović, on inequality and the role of globalisation, as well as lectures by other renowned scholars. Around 25 students from all over the world...

A new version of the Penn World Table, 9.0, has been released and is available here.

Robert Inklaar and Marcel Timmer presented at a conference at MIT on International Comparisons of Income, Prices, and Production, on the upcoming update to version 9 of the Penn World Table. Participants included Nobel laureate Angus Deaton (Princeton),...

Gaaitzen de Vries, Abdul Azeez Erumban and Marcel Timmer presented at the fourth World KLEMS conference in Madrid on May 23 and 24 on issues of productivity and global value chains

The answer is 'no', as shown in a paper by Robert Inklaar and Prasada Rao (University of Queensland) that has just been accepted by the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, which ranks in the top ten of economics journals.

We were very happy that a committee of esteemed colleagues recognized the usefulness of our research and database development efforts in the national Research Review of the faculty's research school, SOM. This helped contribute to the faculty's research...

This summer, from July 11-15, the GGDC organizes a Summer School on the topic of Globalization and Inequality. Lecturers include Branko Milanović, Remco Oostendorp and Leandro Prados de la Escosura. The Summer School is intended for PhD students, research...

Productivity gains from a more efficient allocation of capital and labor across firms are large. However, a recent study of manufacturing firms in low- and middle-income countries by Robert Inklaar, Addisu Lashitew and Marcel Timmer, finds that the gains...

A recent discussion on VoxEU about trends in world GDP illustrates how the wider use of Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs) would lead to figures that are more readily plausible and easier to interpret.

Herman de Jong and Marcel Timmer contributed to the KVS Preadviezen “De match tussen mens en machine” [The match between man and machine], edited by Bas ter Weel. They presented their contributions at the Behandeling van de KVS Preadviezen in The Hague.

Marcel Timmer participated in a round table discussion on 'Future Trends in the Economics of Growth', where he talked about the need for more work on growth of welfare, rather than GDP; see his presentation. The round table was hosted by Mark Sanders of...

The next version of the Penn World Table, version 9.0, is currently under development with numerous changes. There is no firm release date at this point, other than 'as soon as possible'. Our best estimate at this point will be a release in the first...

A paper by Robert Inklaar and Erwin Diewert on "Measuring industry productivity and cross-country convergence" has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Econometrics, in a special issue on economic measurement. The paper finds that cross-country...

Robert Inklaar presented research-in-progress with Jutta Bolt at a World Bank meeting. The main question is whether the World Bank's approach to measuring global poverty does adequate justice to cross-country differences and whether a new method for...

A paper co-authored by Robert Feenstra from UC Davis, Robert Inklaar and Marcel Timmer has appeared in the October issue of the American Economic Review. The paper details the new version of the widely-used Penn World Table, how this database can best be...