This chapter marks the 10th anniversary of the OECD Global Forum on Productivity (GFP), reflecting on its contributions to the global productivity debate and highlighting priorities for action in the years ahead. The GFP has advanced the knowledge frontier on how productivity growth is shaped by firm heterogeneity, global trade integration, technological diffusion, and several aspects of human capital. It has also deepened the understanding of productivity through methodological innovation, microdata-driven analysis, and the production of new data. The chapter synthesises findings across key themes, emphasising the need for evidence-based policymaking. Looking forward, the GFP will continue to explore frontier topics such as technology adoption including AI, how productivity growth is defined by population ageing and the green transition, and the resilience–efficiency trade-off, all while supporting data development and institutional capacity for productivity worldwide.
The Global Forum on Productivity at 10
Abstract
Productivity growth stands as the fundamental driver of rising living standards and economic prosperity, yet economies worldwide have experienced a concerning deceleration in productivity gains since the early 21st century. This slowdown presents one of the most pressing challenges facing policymakers today, as it directly threatens the capacity of nations to improve the well-being of their citizens and maintain competitive advantages in an increasingly interconnected global economy. The complexity of productivity dynamics, encompassing technology diffusion, business innovation, skills, and sound institutional frameworks – requires policy responses that are informed by rigorous research and international collaboration.
This book examines the substantial contributions of the OECD's Global Forum on Productivity (GFP) to addressing these challenges over its first decade of operation from 2015 to 2025. The OECD’s GFP was created in 2015 to support and generate synergies in policy-oriented research related to productivity, facilitate the exchange of views on best practices, including institutional set-ups, and share data and experiences on productivity-related policies.1 Over the past ten years, the GFP has undertaken activities in three areas – research, convening and communication – while drawing upon and complementing other OECD work on productivity. In 2025, the GFP will celebrate its 10th anniversary at its annual conference. This chapter reviews the contributions of the GFP to the international debate on productivity over the past ten years.
Since the mid-2000s, the slowdown in productivity growth (Figure 1.1) reflected both weaker multi-factor productivity (MFP) developments and slower capital accumulation, with a small GDP per capita pickup following the global financial crisis that was largely employment-driven (André and Gal, 2024). The OECD’s Future of Productivity report (OECD, 2015a) noted that this slowdown partly owed to a limited diffusion of global frontier innovations to other firms. It concluded that policy reforms can help revive the diffusion machine, optimise the use of scarce resources – especially skills – and clear the path for higher productivity growth.
The Future of Productivity report provided important new insights and gave a new impetus to work on productivity at the OECD, aimed at enhancing understanding of productivity growth and its determinants and ultimately help devise policies and approaches to strengthen productivity growth. It also scoped the prospective activities of the GFP (OECD, 2015a), suggesting four areas of priority work: a) the slow diffusion of innovation and technology, and the role of policy in it; b) the impact of agglomeration factors on productivity; c) the link between trade, global value chains (GVCs) and productivity; and d) the design of institutions to promote higher productivity.
As shown in this book, the bulk of these themes were picked up in the GFP work over the years, though not always with the same depth and degree of intensity. Since 2015, the GFP has also selected new themes for analysis, responding to emerging priorities and insights into the drivers of productivity, as demonstrated by its work on telework following the COVID-19 crisis, and the work on the human side of productivity. Moreover, annual events (including workshops and webinars) have allowed the GFP to explore a broad range of other issues.
Growth rate in gross value added per capita (%)
Note: G20 Emerging (G20EME) includes (unweighted average) Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, and Türkiye; G20 Advanced (G20ADV) includes Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States; GFP includes all GFP countries but the European Union and treats the Asian Productivity Organisation as the average of Korea, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.
Source: OECD analytical database
This chapter examines the GFP research work over the years and concludes with a prospective discussion on the challenges to productivity growth and hence potential areas for future work of the GFP. It describes the GFP contribution in five key areas of productivity analysis, namely on:
frontier firms and business dynamism, particularly the role of leaders and laggards in productivity growth and the role of competition for business dynamism
internationalisation, with a focus on the role of global value chains for productivity
human capital, covering the use of skills in firms and difficulties firms face in recruiting suitable personnel
adoption of new technologies, with a focus on telework
institutions and frameworks, particularly the role of pro-productivity institutions.
These five research areas form an interconnected framework for understanding productivity growth. Frontier firms and business dynamism establish the foundation by examining how leading companies drive aggregate productivity gains while laggards hold back overall performance, with competition serving as the key mechanism that forces resource reallocation toward more productive firms. Internationalisation through global value chains amplifies this process by exposing firms to international competition, knowledge spillovers, and access to specialised inputs that can boost productivity across the entire chain. However, firms can only capitalise on these competitive pressures and international opportunities if they possess adequate human capital - the right skills and talent to innovate, adapt, and implement productivity-enhancing practices. Technological change, exemplified by the adoption of telework, represents both a driver and outcome of this process, as productive firms leverage new technologies to gain competitive advantages while simultaneously requiring skilled workers to implement these innovations effectively. Underpinning all these dynamics are institutions and frameworks that create the enabling environment.2
In all these areas the GFP provided an important contribution to the existing frontier of knowledge. The work developed under the GFP programme has had wide-ranging impact, feeding into analytical efforts both within the OECD and across national institutions. Insights and tools generated through the programme have informed country-specific productivity reviews and contributed to capacity-building activities in a diverse set of economies, helping to strengthen the analytical foundations for evidence-based policymaking. Moreover, GFP research has been integrated into broader OECD flagship publications and policy dialogues, while also supporting reform discussions at national level. Through this multi-layered engagement, the programme has directly influenced productivity policy design in several countries, helping governments to tailor interventions to their specific structural challenges and institutional contexts.
The chapter also provides highlights of the GFP work. Rather than being exhaustive, it focuses on projects commissioned and funded by the GFP and conducted by the OECD Secretariat, as well as annual conferences (see Box 1.1), and selected national references that contributed to GFP work and events where relevant. In the penultimate section, the chapter examines some new questions that have emerged in the productivity space and lists some existing questions that remain unresolved. It emphasises the need to understand how emerging challenges – AI, ageing, the green transition – interact with productivity dynamics. Key themes include the determinants of technology diffusion, in particular of AI, and its uneven adoption across firms; the implications of demographic change for workforce skills and innovation; and how the green transition and supply chain resilience may reshape sectoral productivity patterns. The section further stresses the role of well-designed institutions and policy evaluation in driving effective reform. Lastly, it highlights the importance for the understanding of productivity growth of using firm-level data and of investing in measurement, particularly for intangible assets, digital outputs, and productivity of services.
The GFP set itself several goals in 2015 (OECD, 2015a). In the area of convening and communications, it agreed to hold an annual high-level meeting of the GFP, to hold smaller-scale productivity workshops, to develop a GFP website, and to develop a new OECD Productivity Working Paper Series. All of these goals were achieved, with annual meetings held every year, a range of webinars and other events, including high-level events focused on Latin America (see Box 1.2); an extensive website, including productivity-related information on GFP members; and a dedicated OECD Productivity Working Paper series.
Different formats of events serve different audiences and objectives. The Annual Conferences bring together all members around carefully selected topics, creating a comprehensive platform for exchanging best practices and showcasing members’ work to the broader community. Ministerial-level conferences elevate key issues to the highest political level, ensuring that critical topics receive the attention and commitment needed from senior decision-makers. Technical workshops and webinars focus primarily on academic presentations, offering participants opportunities to engage with cutting-edge research and learn from the frontier of knowledge in their respective fields.
Annex 1.A summarises all large-scale events organised by the GFP over 2015-2025. More details on the work of the GFP over the past 10 years can be found on the GFP’s website: http://oe.cd/GFP.
Frontier firms: Business dynamics, heterogeneity and competition
The OECD’s report on the Future of Productivity identified a growing productivity gap between high and low productivity firms (OECD, 2015a). One of the first goals that the GFP set itself in 2015 was to deepen understanding of this productivity gap. The OECD’s 2015 findings led to a wide range of follow-up work at the OECD and beyond, to which the GFP contributed with several studies.
Andrews, Criscuolo and Gal (2015) analyse the characteristics of firms that operate at the global productivity frontier and their relationship with other firms in the economy, focusing on the diffusion of global productivity gains and the policies that facilitate it. Their paper finds that firms at the global productivity frontier – defined as the most productive firms in each two-digit industry across 23 countries – are typically larger, more profitable, younger and more likely to patent and be part of a multinational group than other firms. Despite the slowdown in aggregate productivity, productivity growth at the global frontier remained robust over the 2000s. At the same time, the rising productivity gap between the global frontier and other firms raises key questions about why seemingly non-rival technologies do not diffuse to all firms. The analysis reveals a highly uneven process of technological diffusion, which is consistent with a model whereby global frontier technologies only diffuse to laggards once they are adapted to country-specific circumstances by the most productive firms within each country (i.e. national frontier firms).
This suggests the need for an analysis of the sources of differences in the productivity and size of national frontier firms vis-à-vis the global frontier and the catch-up of laggard firms to the national productivity frontier. Econometric analysis suggests that well-designed framework policies can aid productivity diffusion by sharpening firms’ incentives for technological adoption and by promoting a market environment that reallocates resources to the most productive firms.
Andrews, Criscuolo and Gal (2016) further extend the micro-level analysis of productivity (see Chapter 2). A particularly striking feature of the productivity slowdown is not so much lower productivity growth at the global frontier, but rather rising labour productivity at the global frontier coupled with an increasing labour productivity divergence between the global frontier and laggard (non-frontier) firms, which applies to both manufacturing and especially service firms (Figure 1.2). This productivity divergence remains after controlling for differences in capital deepening and mark-up behaviour, suggesting that divergence in measured multi-factor productivity (MFP) may in fact reflect technological divergence in a broad sense. This divergence could plausibly reflect the potential for structural changes in the global economy – notably digitalisation, globalisation and the rising importance of tacit knowledge – to fuel rapid productivity gains at the global frontier. Yet, aggregate MFP performance was significantly weaker in industries where MFP divergence was more pronounced, suggesting that the divergence observed is not solely driven by frontier firms pushing the boundary outward. The distinction between frontier and non-frontier firms in productivity analysis fed into numerous OECD analyses ever since. Moreover, it is one of the various examples of synergies between GFP work and analyses in its founding Committees (Box 1.2).
The paper further suggests that increasing MFP divergence – and the global productivity slowdown more generally – could reflect a slowdown in the diffusion process. This could be a reflection of increasing costs for laggard firms of moving from an economy based on production to one based on ideas. But it could also be symptomatic of rising entry barriers and a decline in the contestability of markets. The paper also finds that the rise in MFP divergence is much more extreme in sectors where pro-competitive product market reforms were least extensive, suggesting that policy weaknesses may be stifling technology diffusion in OECD countries.
Labour productivity: value added per worker (2003-2020)
Note: The global frontier is measured by the average of log labour productivity for the top 5% of companies with the highest productivity levels within each two-digit industry. Laggards capture the average log productivity of all the other firms. Unweighted averages across two-digit industries are shown for manufacturing and services, normalised to 0 in the starting year. The vertical axes represent log-differences from the starting year Services cover non-financial business services NACE Rev2 industries 45-82 excluding 64-66 and 68.
Source: Updated calculations following Andrews et al (2016) using the 2023 vintage of the Orbis firm-level financial accounts database by Moody’s/BvD.
The creation of the GFP was endorsed by the Economic Policy Committee (EPC) and its Working Party No. 1 (WP1), the Committee on Industry, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), and the Economic Development Review Committee (EDRC). As a part of their Programme of Work and Budget, GFP work expanded and complemented the activities of the founding Committees and strengthened the OECD leadership in the space of productivity analysis among International Organisations. In fact, the GFP’s ability to leverage inputs from all these communities of policymakers is arguably one of its greatest strengths.
One such example of complementarities is how Andrews et al. (2016) laid the groundwork for the analysis of so-called “zombie firms” in WP1, which highlighted how weak market dynamics and barriers to resource reallocation can impede productivity growth by allowing low-performing firms to persist (Adalet McGowan et al., 2017). It also spurred a broader expansion of measurement work focused on productivity dispersion within countries, encouraging the development of new indicators and microdata-based approaches to better capture the distributional patterns of productivity across firms and sectors, such as CIIE work on the Great Divergence (e.g. Berlingieri, Blanchenay and Criscuolo, 2017; Berlingieri et al., 2020).
Moreover, if WP1 analysis explored how allocative efficiency and skill mismatch are related (Adalet McGowan and Andrews, 2015), GFP analyses greatly expanded the body of evidence on the role of human capital - skills, workforce diversity, and managerial competencies - for firm productivity growth. Similarly, GFP efforts in leveraging linked employer-employee data under the Human Side of Productivity umbrella complemented work by CIIE, WP1 and the Employment, Labour and Social Affairs Committee to understand the link between productivity and wages at the firm level (Criscuolo et al., 2020; Criscuolo et al., 2021a).
The GFP work on telework adoption and its impact on productivity also complements broader OECD research on the role of information and communication technology (ICT in driving productivity growth. This the case for instance of WP1 analyses on digitalisation and productivity (Gal et al., 2019; Sorbe et al., 2019) and EDRC country-specific explorations on the same theme (Mosiashvili and Pareliussen, 2020; Borowiecki et al., 2021).
Further GFP work quantified this decrease in competition and business dynamism. Bajgar et al. (2019) finds a clear and significant increase in industry concentration in Europe and North America (Figure 1.3). The study combines several firm-level data sources and applies a careful apportioning of activities in large business groups, while also mobilising micro-aggregated data from the OECD MultiProd dataset. Increasing industry concentration is found to be widespread across regions and broad industries, pointing to global factors – technological change and integration across borders – as potential determinants driving this phenomenon. These results contribute to the debate about declining business dynamism and the changing nature of competition. Follow-up work at the OECD found that the rising market share of already leading business groups is larger for industries where intangible assets (e.g. software, R&D) are used more heavily, in line with the idea that in such environments scaling up production is easier if a firm is already successful (Bajgar, Criscuolo and Timmis, 2021).
Change since initial year. Index : 2000=0
Note: ‘Europe’ covers Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and ‘North America’ covers Canada and the United States. Manufacturing and non-financial market services are included. Concentration metrics reflect the share of the top 8 firms in each industry (CR8). The graphs can be interpreted as the cumulated absolute changes in levels of sales concentration for the mean 2-digit sector within each region. For instance, in 2014 the mean European services industry had 4 percentage point higher sales concentration than in 2000.
Source: Bajgar et al. (2019).
Several of the GFP’s annual events have explored business dynamism and productivity, including the events in Sydney (2019) and Berlin (2020). National studies have also built on the work of the GFP. For example, Fontoura Gouveia and Osterhold (2018) assess the role of zombies on firm dynamics in Portugal, both in the extensive and intensive margins. The paper confirms a high prevalence of zombie firms that are significantly less productive than their healthy counterparts, dragging down aggregate productivity. The paper finds evidence of positive selection within zombies: the most productive are restructured, while the least productive exit. It also shows that zombies' productivity threshold for exit is much lower than that of non-zombies. As a result, zombies are able to remain in the market, which distorts competition and saps resources. Zombie prevalence also curbs the growth of viable firms, in particular the most productive, harming the intra-sectoral resource reallocation. The study shows that a reduction in exit and restructuring barriers promotes a more effective exit channel and fosters the restructuring of the most productive firms. The results highlight the role of public policy in addressing zombies' prevalence, fostering a more efficient resource allocation and enabling productivity growth.
Productivity, global value chains and development
Better understanding the impacts on productivity of the growing internationalisation of production in global value chains was another goal that the GFP set itself in 2015. The 2017 Annual Conference of the GFP in Budapest provided a first step and focused on the theme of “Openness, global value chains, and productivity-enhancing policies”. Criscuolo and Timmis (2018a) develop new “centrality” metrics that go beyond the existing indicators of GVC participation. The study utilises metrics from graph theory to identify those sectors and countries that are highly central hubs and those that are peripheral, thus reflecting the influence of sectors within production networks. Central sectors reflect those that are highly connected (both directly and indirectly) and influential within global production networks, while peripheral sectors exhibit weak linkages to other sectors and countries.
The study finds that there have been profound changes in the structure of GVCs over the period 1995-2011 (Figure 1.4).3 For some activities there have been dramatic changes in the geography of economic activity (e.g. information technology [IT] manufacturing), with the central hub for the industry moving from the United States and Japan in 1995 to China in 2011, even if influence in the GVC spread more evenly across countries. Other activities conversely became more influential for value chains almost universally (e.g. IT services). Several emerging economies and their industries have become more central to global production networks. The study finds that this was particularly true for most peripheral industries of Eastern European countries, with their growing importance coinciding with the timing of their EU accession.
The study also notes that policy can play a role in determining centrality and hence a country’s position within GVCs. Advances in communication technology have enabled the fragmentation of production and permitted production to develop into the complex global network it is today. However, the changing structure of GVCs has not entirely been a technology story. Many emerging economies have increased their overall importance within global production networks. This is particularly true for Eastern European countries.
Change in the composition of central countries for the sector. 1 = average centrality
Note: Central sectors reflect those that are highly connected (both directly and indirectly) and influential within global production network. The indicator reflects the influence of a country relative to all other countries in the network for the industry. It is therefore largely a function the number of connected countries via the value chains.
Source: Criscuolo and Timmis (2018a).
A follow-up GFP study (Criscuolo and Timmis, 2018b) examines how changes in the structure of GVCs impact firm productivity growth (see Chapter 3). It again uses “centrality” metrics to measure position within Global Value Chains (GVCs), reflecting central hubs and peripheral country-sectors, and link changes in centrality to firm productivity growth across countries. It also examines whether the composition of foreign buyers and suppliers matters for productivity.
Becoming more influential within GVC networks appears to be important for the catch-up of non-frontier firms, whereas, for those firms that are already large or near the frontier, becoming more influential does not appear to impact productivity. The study finds that the changing structure of GVCs can play a role in the catch up of firms. Increasing centrality is associated with faster productivity growth of smaller or non-frontier firms and also with overall firm productivity growth in post-2004 EU members or smaller countries. However, this association weakens in countries with large domestic markets. In fact, here is no correlation between centrality and productivity growth when considering all firms in the data. The study finds either insignificant or even negative correlations for larger or frontier firms or firms in larger countries.
Moreover, the authors find that supplying or buying from faster growing foreign sectors is correlated with faster productivity growth of smaller or non-frontier firms, with these correlations weakening with firm size or proximity to the frontier. Foreign linkages expose such firms to higher quality standards, different embedded technologies, and stronger competitive pressures, which can incentivise firms to improve efficiency.
The stronger correlations that are observed for smaller and non-frontier firms suggest that the domestic spillovers of GVCs may be at least as important as the impacts on those firms directly involved in GVCs. Whilst the data do not allow to test this precisely, the study finds that productivity growth is stronger in sectors that have stronger indirect linkages to highly productive foreign sectors (e.g. as domestic suppliers of exporters) compared to those sectors with stronger direct linkages (e.g. as exporters). This is consistent with a narrative where foreign firms share knowledge with domestic suppliers, with spillovers transmitted down domestic supply chains (e.g. Alfaro-Urena, Manelici and Vasquez, 2022).
Moreover, GFP work shows that the link between the changing structure of GVCs and firm productivity is dependent upon the policy environment. Framework policies, particularly flexible labour markets, matter for the diffusion of productivity. In economies with flexible labour markets, the diffusion of foreign productivity growth to non-frontier firms is stronger and weakens with the stringency of employment regulation. The study finds no evidence of foreign productivity growth effects on non-frontier or frontier firms for those economies in the sample with the least flexible labour markets. In addition, the correlation between changes in the structure of GVCs and firm productivity is strengthened in environments with stronger contract enforcement and intellectual property protection. Finally, the study finds that the availability of credit and the complexity of customs procedures are associated with stronger productivity diffusion.
The results suggest that traditional policy measures to encourage integration and influence within GVCs (such as trade facilitation, export guarantees, etc.) are important for the productivity of non-frontier or smaller firms, and also firms in smaller or non-frontier economies. They also suggest that the composition of buyer and supplier networks appear to matter for spillovers to non-frontier firms and for firms overall in larger or higher-income economies. These results suggest that policies that facilitate GVC integration may be needed, as they encourage the formation of linkages with highly productive foreign firms and economies.
Gal and Witheridge (2019) revisit the link between global value chain (GVC) integration and productivity and the role of innovation, building on a combination of detailed cross-country industry level datasets. Their paper quantifies the extent to which weak productivity performance in recent years is related to a slowdown in GVC participation. It finds that forward participation, i.e. supplying intermediates, is related to more spending on innovation and is key for productivity benefits, but only when the destination countries have high levels of productivity. Differences across sectors are also important: manufacturing productivity benefits from importing intermediates (backward participation), especially from advanced countries, while forward participation matters more for productivity in services, consistent with their crucial role as supplying inputs to other sectors.
While most of the work of the GFP has been focused on the role of GVCs for productivity, some attention was given to the role of multinational enterprises (MNEs) for productivity, with national studies contributing to this aspect of the GFP’s work. For example, Di Ubaldo, Lawless and Siedschlag (2018) use Irish firm-level data on both manufacturing and services firms and find limited evidence of a negative link between the presence of foreign-owned firms and the productivity of domestic firms in the same industry or the same region. Examining forward and backward linkages through supply chains indicates that on average, selling to foreign-owned firms has a positive effect while buying from foreign owned firms has a negative effect on the average productivity of domestic firms. Considering the absorptive capacity of domestic firms and allowing the spillover effects to differ depending on the origin of the parent companies, they find that the positive productivity spillovers come from supply chain linkages between domestic firms investing in R&D and foreign affiliates of multinationals with headquarters outside the European Union.
Slobodnitsky, Druker and Geva (2018) examine the impact of MNEs on labour productivity in Israel4. They find that, on average, current employment at an MNE is associated with a wage premium of 8.3%. Moreover, past work experience at an MNE has a positive 1.6% impact on wages. Although economically significant, the results are relatively modest compared to those reported in the literature. In addition, they differentiate MNEs according to size and brand recognition and find that the impact on wages is larger for leading MNEs.
Questions linked to GVCs and the role of MNEs have also been part of the work on productivity and economic development that was carried out by the GFP (Box 1.3).
The GFP’s work has also examined how productivity is relevant to the development agenda, in particular for countries in Latin America and beyond OECD members. To advance work in this area, the GFP held a number of ministerial meetings on productivity, in Santiago (2016), San Jose (2018), Bogota (2019) and Brasilia (2022). Moreover, a Global Dialogue on the Future of Productivity was held in Mexico in July 2015 and provided the basis for the establishment of the GFP later that year.
Santiago, Chile, 5-6 December 2016: Boosting Productivity and Inclusive Growth in Latin America. This event was hosted by Chile and co-organised by the GFP and the Inter-American Development Bank and was the first high-level event of the OECD Latin America and the Caribbean Regional Programme.
San Jose, Costa Rica, 18 April 2018: 2nd Ministerial Summit on Productivity. This event was organised by the Ministry of Foreign Trade of Costa Rica, the OECD and the World Bank. It examined how regional trade integration can boost productivity growth, sharing knowledge and learning from best practices and frontier research.
Bogota, Colombia, 25 October 2019: Harnessing the Digital Transformation to Boost Productivity in Latin America and the Caribbean. The third Ministerial summit was organised by Colombia’s National Planning Department, the OECD, the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the European Union.
Brasilia, Brazil, 23-24 June 2022: Towards a Productive, Human-Centred and Sustainable Integration in the World Economy. The fourth Ministerial summit was organised by Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the GFP and examined how to boost productivity, strengthen skills development and promote sustainable integration into the world economy.
The human side of productivity
Today, there is greater understanding of the central role that human capital plays in productivity growth, including through its complementarities with investment in fixed and intangible capital, and also with new technologies, notably digital technologies and artificial intelligence.
Reflecting this important role, human capital has been the main focus of the GFP’s work over the past five years, starting with the seminal work on The Human Side of Productivity (Criscuolo et al., 2021b). This study draws on a network of researchers and partners from 10 countries to analyse administrative linked employer-employee datasets with detailed information on millions of firms and their employees. The use of firm microdata is one of the defining features of GFP work through the years, and an area where the GFP significantly contributed to the literature. This is particularly true for linked employer-employee data (Box 1.4).
The Global Forum on Productivity (GFP) has played a key role in advancing the tools used to analyse the drivers and trends of productivity across OECD economies. Beyond fostering international dialogue, the GFP has contributed to methodological innovation, improving the analytical rigour and depth of productivity research. This has allowed policymakers and researchers not only to revisit long-standing questions with new precision, but also to explore new areas of inquiry. In many respects, the GFP positioned itself at the frontier of productivity analysis - often ahead of the founding OECD bodies that initiated it (e.g. Box 1.3).
One of the most notable contributions has been the increased use of firm-level microdata, which has made it possible to investigate the distributional aspects of productivity. Rather than relying solely on aggregate or sectoral statistics, this approach allows researchers to examine the full distribution of firm productivity, identifying which firms are driving national productivity growth and which are lagging behind (e.g., Andrews et al., 2016). This distinction allows for better targeted policies, as it reveals the importance of diffusion mechanisms, competitive dynamics, and barriers that prevent lower-performing firms from improving their productivity.
GFP work on the Human Side of Productivity has also pioneered the use of linked employer–employee datasets. Datasets that simultaneously contain information on the firm and on its employees allow for a more detailed understanding of how workforce characteristics such as skills, workers’ mobility, or demographics interact with firm-level productivity. The GFP could thus explore complex issues like the role of management practices and workforce diversity for productivity, which were previously hard to quantify with traditional data sources.
In addition, the GFP has also contributed to the production of new, policy-relevant data. For example, it has designed a survey on telework practices that was distributed to social partners during COVID, to obtain timely data on how firms were adjusting to restrictions of movement and the need to work remotely (Criscuolo et al., 2021b). A second data collection by the GFP surveyed approx. 20 000 firms across OECD and non-OECD economies to measure the pervasiveness of labour shortages, their causes and consequences for firms (Filippucci, Laengle and Marcolin, 2025). These innovations have helped bridge persistent gaps between research and policy, equipping decision-makers with more granular evidence.
Criscuolo et al. (2021b) finds that differences in firms’ productivity performance are closely related to the use of skills. Top performing firms employ almost twice the share of high skilled employees compared to the least productive firms (Figure 1.5, panel A). However, country-specific patterns reveal that firms at the productivity frontier can pursue different skill strategies depending on national circumstances. For instance, while firms at the productivity frontier in France specialise in the intensive use of high skills, top productivity firms in Germany – a country with a well-established system for vocational training – also make intensive use of medium skills (Figure 1.5, panel B). From a sectoral perspective, the evidence shows that medium skills are particularly widespread among the best performers in the traditional, less knowledge intensive services – such as wholesale, retail, hotels, restaurants and transport.
More broadly, despite the pervasive focus on high skills at the productivity frontier in all countries, top-performing firms also rely significantly on the full range of skills, including medium- and low-skilled workers. Beyond general skills, the study also highlights the systematic link between firm productivity and the use of specific skills, such as management and communication (soft skills) and ICT skills (hard skills).
Distinguishing managers from other workers shows that manager skills can have a disproportionate impact on firm performance, due to their key position within the firm’s organisation. But high skilled managers and a highly skilled workforce are strongly complementary; high skilled managers are most effective when working with a highly skilled workforce. Reaping the full productivity gains associated with adjusting the firm’s skill structure – also taking into account manager-worker complementarities – corresponds to closing the productivity gap between the typical median performer firm and the frontier by 20%.
The study also examines the role of firm organisation and cultural and gender diversity. Devoting more resources to formal management is linked to higher productivity, although the link is weaker in countries with traditionally flatter hierarchies (Denmark and Sweden). The results also show that more gender and culturally diverse firms are more productive. Diversity especially benefits managers, who can gain the most from the more comprehensive perspective diversity offers for decision making and identifying business opportunities. Moreover, drawing on a broader pool of diverse candidates for better job matching may also be important for managers. Since most firms currently exhibit low levels of diversity, increasing diversity could yield significant productivity gains and potentially close productivity gaps by about 10%.
Adding up all these productivity gains, the study suggests that adjusting the workforce composition could close productivity gaps by about one third. These large gains show that people and the way they interact within the firm matter for productivity, an aspect that has been given relatively less attention in policy making. These gains are estimated to be larger than those coming from adjusting physical capital to that of the best performing firms (20%).
Note: Top-performing and medium firms refer to the 10th decile and 40-60th percentile of the productivity distribution within country x industry x year cells, with industries defined at the STAN A38 level.
Source: Criscuolo et al. (2021b) based on linked employer-employee data.
The report on the human side of productivity was complemented by several national studies, including for Belgium (Bijnens and Dhyne, 2021), France (Brun-Schammé and Rey, 2021), Italy (Andretta, Brunetti and Rosso, 2021) and Portugal (Martins, 2021; Alexandre, Cruz and Portela, 2021). Preliminary results for Portugal and Denmark, for example, were presented at the 4th Annual GFP Conference in Sydney in 2019 and confirmed a significant link between the demographic and skill characteristics of the workforce and firm productivity (OECD, 2019).
Subsequent GFP work has focused on the role of gender diversity for productivity (Kögel et al., 2023). Increasing the participation of women in leadership positions is a policy goal in many countries for equity reasons, but diversity may also matter for productivity, as already demonstrated in Criscuolo et al. (2021b). The paper provides a firm-level analysis of the impact of gender diversity in senior management on firm-level productivity based on a novel cross-country firm-level dataset with detailed information on firms’ senior management group and other standard firm characteristics.
The main finding of the paper is that increasing the female share in senior management raises productivity, particularly for firms with a low initial share of women in senior management. Productivity gains from an increase in female managers are highest for firms with less than 5% females in senior management. On average across these firms, increasing the female share to 20% (sample average) would increase their productivity by around 1.4%. Given that these firms account for about 40% of value added in the sample, this would increase average productivity in the sample by 0.6%. To put this productivity-increase into perspective, it is equal to half of the average annual productivity growth of firms in the sample over 2015-2019.
The findings suggest that the underrepresentation of women at the top of the corporate hierarchy implies substantial costs and that it is therefore important for governments and firms to take action. A wide range of policies can help increase female representation in management positions. Beyond widely used mandatory gender quotas and voluntary targets, this also includes family support policies and policies aiming at combating gender stereotyping within society.
A further spin-off of the research on human capital is the exploration of the workforce’s ability to perform green tasks. The Green Side of Productivity project examined whether the most productive firms rely more on “green” and less on “brown” jobs. To link shares of “green” and “brown” jobs to productivity at the firm level, the project requires a detailed classification of “green” and “brown” occupations, which were built by the GFP based on seminal work on US data. The classification was then applied to linked employer-employee data from Portugal, France, and Denmark. Results suggest that more productive firms indeed rely more on “green” and less on “brown” jobs, and that this is not driven by the different skill content of “green” and “brown” jobs. As more productive firms rely more on "green" and less on "brown" jobs, independently of the skill content of these job types, the transition to a green economy may not involve a productivity trade-off and instead unequivocally enhance productivity growth.
A fourth important area of GFP work linked to human capital has been recent work on reallocation and mismatch following the COVID-19 pandemic (Ciminelli et al., 2024). The paper finds a significant reallocation of labour demand and supply across occupations in the wake of the pandemic. Both online job postings and jobseekers’ clicks persistently shifted away from customer-facing occupations, such as sales and administrative assistance, to care and education occupations as well as software development. The reallocation of job postings and clicks that took place in the first three months of the pandemic was large, amounting to the total reallocation observed over the previous four years. Occupational mismatch initially increased but was back to pre-pandemic levels at the end of 2022 as employers and workers adjusted to structural changes. The adjustment was substantially slower in countries that resorted to short-time work schemes to preserve employment during the pandemic. While COVID-19 temporarily disrupted labour market matching efficiency, the economy's ability to reallocate workers across occupations and restore matching effectiveness suggests resilient productivity-enhancing reallocation mechanisms that can adapt to structural economic shifts.
More recent GFP research complemented this body of evidence by investigating the role of labour shortages in determining productivity. A first study built a new dataset of labour market tightness and qualification mismatches across approximately 30 countries and 38 industries, based on microdata from labour force surveys (Dorville, Filippucci and Marcolin, 2025). It shows that tightness has been increasing dramatically over time, and especially in the United States. Moreover, the increase has been generalised across virtually all sectors of the economy, but knowledge-intensive sectors, such as Finance, Health and ICT services experienced the largest increase. Qualification mismatch, instead, is found mostly stable over time, following declining under-qualification and rising over-qualification. This research then explores the link between five key structural trends—demographic change, decarbonisation, digitalisation, deglobalisation, and exposure to artificial intelligence – and shortages and mismatches, both in the short-run and dynamically. The analysis reveals that both digitalisation and decarbonisation result in higher tightness, while AI reduces tightness and overqualification, especially when it acts as substitute for labour. Workforce ageing increases tightness especially in the medium run, forcing firms to use less qualified workers (down-skilling). An increase in sectoral tightness decreases firm total factor productivity and increases capital investment, and especially so in firms that were initially more capital intensive, suggesting that firms react to tightness by investing in automation.
A second study expanded the analysis at the firm level with the aid of a new firm-level survey that was designed by the GFP (Filippucci, Laengle and Marcolin, 2025). The 2024 GFP Employer Survey on labour shortages reached approximately 20 000 firms online across 36 OECD and non-OECD countries, asking them for information on their difficulties in recruiting personnel, including information on the causes and consequences of such difficulties for the firm. Five key facts on firm-level labour shortages emerge from the analysis:
Labour shortages are both widespread and severe across the surveyed countries and sectors. On average across countries, approximately 80% of employers report recruitment difficulties, with one-third indicating that most or all of their vacancies are hard to fill.
Firms with shortages are more likely to require new skills, and to report significant skill mismatch on the job, i.e. that workers are entrusted with tasks for which they do not have the right skill set.
Younger firms (i.e. firms that have existed for at most five years) report a 10 percentage-point higher probability of experiencing labour shortages. Growing firms consistently report higher shortages, with the gap most pronounced among small enterprises.
Firms adopting green, AI, and digital technologies report significantly higher labour shortages - up to 15 percentage points more than the average company in some countries.
Firms facing more difficulties recruiting are typically less productive. However, the relationship is U-shaped: both low-productivity and top-productivity (frontier) firms report higher labour shortages. Moreover, the shortages in low- and high-productivity firms are fundamentally different in nature. Firms in the GFP Employer Survey were also asked whether difficulties in recruitment resulted in certain consequences for their ability to grow or innovate, and whether they took any action to reduce the extent of labour shortages (Figure 1.6, x-axis):
Relative to high-productivity firms, low-productivity firms are more likely to attribute shortages to low wages and poor working conditions. They also report more frequently that shortages exacerbate productivity losses, including their ability to innovate.
Conversely, high-productivity firms more frequently report that labour shortages emerge because the firms are seeking specific skills that are difficult to find in the market, but they are also more likely to take productivity-enhancing remedies to shortages, such as automation, training, and changes in the organisation of the workforce.
Probability of reporting production losses, low wage/bad working conditions, insufficiently skilled workforce, and better management practices – Difference between high- and low-productivity firms that report experiencing difficulties in recruiting personnel
Note: The graph plots the coefficient of productivity in a regression of the probability of a firm-reporting difficulties recruiting because of a certain feature (x-axis) on the firm’s (log) sales per worker and indicators for the firm’s industry and country. The coefficient is then taken as a share of the average probability of that feature in the sample. “Better management practices” implies that the firm that reports a labour shortage has invested in training, automation of production, or reorganisation of the workforce. Weighted averages over 34 OECD countries, Brazil and South Africa.
Source: Filippucci, Laengle and Marcolin (2025) based on GFP Employer Survey data.
Telework
Motivated by the sudden adoption of telework in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the GFP also studied the impact of telework on productivity (Criscuolo et al., 2021c; Adrjan et al., 2021; Milasi, Gonzalez-Vazquez and Fernandez-Macias, 2021), building on exploratory OECD work on the topic (OECD, 2020). By considering the deployment of telework as an innovation in managerial practices, the stream of work directly related to previous GFP work on the human side of productivity.
The GFP undertook an online survey in 25 countries among managers and workers about their experience and expectations of telework. Criscuolo et al. (2021c) show that a large majority of managers and workers had a positive experience from teleworking, even during the initial stages of the pandemic. Around half of the respondents – workers more than managers – emphasised the need for further managerial changes to fully benefit from telework arrangements, such as the coordination of schedules across workers, management training, additional investments in ICT infrastructure and digital skills. These measures were more likely found in initially more productive firms, which likely led to a further widening of productivity gaps between more and less productive firms.
Adrjan et al. (2021) use information on job postings from the online job site Indeed to analyse developments in the adoption of telework across 20 countries. It finds, first, that the incidence of advertised telework almost tripled during the pandemic, albeit with large differences both across sectors and across countries. Second, cross-country differences are largely driven by governmental restrictions to mobility during the pandemic (Figure 1.6). Third, digital preparedness plays an important role in mediating the response of advertised telework to changes in restrictions. The tightening of restrictions has particularly large effects in sectors that are better prepared to adopt digital business models, while their easing has almost no effect in countries with high-quality digital infrastructure.
Mean index of government restrictions to the movement of people, and change in advertised telework
Note: The government restriction index is calculated as the mean value of the Oxford Stringency Index over the January 2020 to September 2021 period. The change in advertised telework during the pandemic refers to the within-sector change in advertised telework during the pandemic.
Source: Adrjan et al. (2021).
Public policies to support the adoption of telework and enhance its benefits for productivity and worker well-being will need to focus on ensuring that workers are provided with an appropriate working environment (e.g. ICT equipment, office space and childcare); facilitating the diffusion of best practice managerial practices (e.g. shift from presenteeism to output-oriented assessment of worker productivity); and ensuring that there are no blind spots in terms of access to a fast, reliable and secure IT infrastructure (e.g., in rural areas, low-income workers) (OECD, 2020). This may involve strengthening key enabling factors, such as digital infrastructure and management skills, as well as catalysing telework by encouraging firms to grant workers the right to telework a minimum number of days per week.
A paper by the European Union also contributed to the GFP work on telework (Milasi, Gonzalez-Vazquez and Fernandez-Macias, 2021), by providing an overview of the trends and differences in the prevalence of telework across EU countries before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper shows that before the outbreak telework was more widespread in ICT- and knowledge-intensive sectors, and generally for high-skilled workers, although with big differences across EU countries. Moreover, the prevalence of telework varied considerably across countries even within the same sector and occupational group. This suggests that, beyond differences in the industrial and occupational structure of employment, other factors, notably related to differences in organisation and management cultures, contribute to explaining the varying prevalence of telework in the EU.
While most of the GFP work has focused on the national level, and national-level determinants of productivity, some work has also been undertaken on the role of agglomeration and the spatial dimensions of productivity (Box 1.5).
In its initial scoping paper, the GFP also expressed interest in exploring the spatial dimensions of productivity. Ahrend et al. (2017) estimate productivity differentials of functionally defined cities across five OECD countries (Germany, Mexico, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and investigate the relationship of urban productivity with a city’s size and its governance structure – the degree of horizontal administrative fragmentation and the presence of a governance body. The paper confirms that city productivity premia tend to increase with city size. Pooled across the five OECD countries, the estimates indicate that, ceteris paribus, a twofold increase in city size is associated with a 2-5% increase in productivity. The analysis indicate that urban productivity is also influenced by the population size of nearby cities. The paper also identifies a significant role for horizontal administrative fragmentation of a city’s governance structure in determining the magnitude of city productivity premia. Specifically, for two cities of similar size and population composition in terms of observable characteristics, but with one city having twice the number of municipalities, the estimates indicate that productivity in the more fragmented city is between 3 and 4% lower. In 2019, the GFP held a workshop on the Spatial Dimensions of Productivity in Bolzano (Italy) which explored the relations between low aggregate productivity growth, declining business dynamism and job reallocation rates, and growing regional disparities in productivity.
The role of pro-productivity institutions
From its start in 2015, the GFP has examined the institutional dimensions of productivity-related policies, notably the role of pro-productivity institutions (Banks, 2015; Renda and Dougherty, 2017; Cavassini et al., 2022). Banks (2015) was a background paper for the pre-GFP Mexico conference in 2015 and also the first OECD Productivity Working Paper. It draws on the experience of Australia’s Productivity Commission to examine the establishment of public institutions that can help governments with productivity-related policies. The study notes that to promote productivity, and thus boost living standards in the long run, public policies need to focus on improving incentives, capabilities and flexibility within an economy. Such policies can be difficult for governments to devise and even more difficult for them to implement, given pressure group politics and fragmented administrative structures. A strong case therefore exists for establishing public institutions that not only help governments identify the right policies, but that can also help them counter pressures against reform and inform the community about what is at stake. Necessary design features for such institutions include independent governance, transparent processes, solid research capacity, an economy-wide frame of reference and linkages to policy-making mechanisms within government.
Banks (2015) provides a taxonomy of relevant institutional forms evaluated against these criteria. While the contribution of most organisations to ‘pro-productivity’ policies is incidental to their primary function, some have been expressly designed for this purpose. The extent of their contributions in practice has depended on the detail of their governance and operations, the tasks they have been assigned and how well governments have handled their reports. While there is no ‘one design fits all’ solution, there is considerable scope for most governments to strengthen institutional capability in this area. There is also potential for governments to learn from each other about the relative merits of different approaches, and for existing institutions themselves to build capability by drawing on the experience of others.
Renda and Dougherty (2017) respond to a call of the GFP to extend the analysis of productivity institutions to a wider set of countries, reviewing the experience of ten pro-productivity institutions, covering Australia, Chile, Denmark, France, Ireland, Mexico, Norway, New Zealand, the United States and the European Union. The selected bodies include government advisory councils, standing inquiry bodies, and ad hoc, temporary task forces. They find that well-designed pro-productivity institutions can generally improve the quality of the policy process and political debate and can make a significant contribution to evidence-based policymaking. Their findings also support the view that concentrating knowledge and research on productivity in one independent, highly skilled and reputed body can help create the momentum and the knowledge that are required to embrace the challenging task of promoting long-term productivity growth.
The paper also finds evidence that while institutions located outside government have more leeway in promoting reforms that challenge vested interests and produce results over a time span that goes beyond the electoral cycle, the existence of smart government bodies can allow experimental policymaking and a more adaptive, evidence-based policy process. They also find that it is of utmost importance to provide these bodies with sufficient resources, skills, transparency and procedural accountability to fulfil their tasks; a sufficiently broad mission, oriented towards long-term well-being and at both supply-side and demand-side considerations; policy evaluation functions; and the ability to reach out to the general public in a variety of ways, from consultation to advocacy, use of social media, and other forms of communication.
Cavassini et al. (2022) draws on the experience with an even wider set of pro-productivity institutions, many of which were set up in EU countries after 2016, following a recommendation by the EU Council on the establishment of national productivity boards (see Chapter 6). The paper presents a new framework to analyse the key characteristics of these pro-productivity institutions (Figure 1.8). The framework draws on a comprehensive stocktaking of pro-productivity institutions and provides actionable policy advice aimed at supporting capabilities and mutual learning across these institutions. The paper finds that pro-productivity institutions rely on a variety of set-ups and approaches to contribute to pro-productivity policies. Despite this variety, the paper identifies some common lessons that can help pro-productivity institutions to continuously strengthen their capabilities. In particular, the paper highlights the importance of guaranteeing the analytical independence of pro-productivity institutions and access to micro-level data on firms and workers to inform policies and interventions with objective data and evidence. The paper also highlights the importance for pro-productivity institutions to be connected to the policy-making process to contribute to the design and implementation of pro-productivity policies.
Source: Cavassini et al. (2022).
Cavassini et al. (2022) opened a new line of research on the political economy of productivity policies that can support countries ensure the effective implementation of policies aimed at enhancing incomes and living standards. The debate on pro-productivity institutions continues to date and the institutional framework in OECD countries continues to evolve; Sweden established a productivity institution in 2023 and Italy and Spain in 2024, whereas the New Zealand Productivity Commission ceased its operations in February 2024, replaced by a new Ministry for Regulation.5
Productivity growth across OECD economies remains uneven and lower than the historic trend. Several new challenges – notably the digital revolution and AI, demographic ageing, the low-carbon transition, and heightened global risks – raise new questions about how productivity is and will be affected by these trends and what policy levers can best support its growth in this new context. At the same time, longstanding issues of data and measurement remain and still need to be addressed to guide evidence-based policymaking. This section highlights key themes for future work in the GFP, drawing on recent OECD and academic analyses. Box 1.6 flags the high-level questions discussed in the rest of this section.
Future GFP work will address emerging challenges – such as the green and digital transitions, demographic shifts and global uncertainty – while also re-assessing long-standing questions about productivity growth. The research will maintain a strong foundation in microdata, employing advanced methodological approaches to analyse the heterogeneity of firm behaviour and outcomes, and producing new data (targeted surveys and linked datasets) to fill existing information gaps. In examining these questions, the analysis will also consider the role of policies in shaping these relationships.
Some of the key prospective questions of analysis include:
What determines business investment and its recent slowdown, at least as far as tangible assets are concerned? What is the role of competition frameworks and business dynamism in stimulating investment?
How does AI reflect on firm productivity? Are lessons the same for generative and non-generative AI?
How do data access, complementary skills, competition and regulatory frameworks shape the pace of technology diffusion and adoption? Do they reinforce the position of leading firms and sectors, or rather enable laggard firms to catch-up?
How will population ageing affect productivity growth, and through which channels? Is ageing affecting economies’ propensity to innovate?
Are decarbonisation and adaptation efforts – including policy instruments that support them – compatible with productivity growth? Can they contribute to reduce within-sector productivity divergence between leaders and laggards?
Is there a trade-off between productivity growth and efforts to diversify and “de-risk” supply chains? How do shocks to critical sectors propagate through the economy and affect productivity growth?
How can one measure productivity in selected parts of the public sector? How does public sector productivity affect productivity in the business sector?
How can one strengthen the effectiveness of pro-productivity institutions (productivity boards, councils or commissions)?
Innovation and technology adoption
One priority is to better understand knowledge diffusion in an era of rapid technological change, particularly AI. The growing availability of AI tools and digital platforms presents both an opportunity and a puzzle: on the one hand, AI could push out the productivity frontier by automating routine tasks and enabling new innovations, thus generating spillovers that raise aggregate productivity growth beyond the productivity of the ICT sector. On the other hand, early evidence indicates that AI adoption is highly concentrated. OECD analysis (Filippucci et al., 2024; André et al., 2025) shows that patenting and development of AI technologies is largely confined to a few leading countries (notably the United States and China), and that many economies remain at an early stage of adoption. Only a relatively small share of firms has so far adopted AI, and these are typically selected firms that displayed complementary human capital and higher initial productivity (Calvino and Fontanelli, 2023; Filippucci et al., 2025). A first key question is therefore how AI affects productivity, in which firms and to which extent. A second important question is whether similar stylised facts still hold in the case of Generative AI, for which the fixed cost of adoption can be significantly lower.
Many new technologies are complex to adopt and require significant adjustment by firms, hence fast diffusion should not be taken for granted. An important question for policy research therefore remains how factors such as data access, complementary skills, competition and regulatory frameworks shape the pace of adoption. Better understanding the channels of diffusion – for example the role of networks, supply chains or international R&D collaborations – is needed. The distributional effects of uneven technology diffusion are also of potential interest for the evolution of business dynamism, competition, growth and inequality across OECD economies, with research investigating whether technology diffusion reinforces the position of leading firms and sectors or rather enables the growth of laggard firms. Recent OECD work emphasises that the productivity impact of AI ultimately depends on how widely it is deployed, and on the presence of pre-existing conditions (OECD, 2024a).
Research should therefore combine analysis of frontier firms that can push the development of technological innovation, with a greater understanding of the patterns of diffusion of technology across firms of different sizes and sectors, an approach that has already yielded significant research in the GFP. New initiatives (such as mapping AI skills and firm surveys on digital adoption) could shed light on why gaps persist and how policy can encourage broader production and diffusion of technology, as in the case of science policies, training, data governance or competition policy. The extent to which AI contributes to the generation of new ideas and innovation is another promising venue of analysis to understand AI’s contribution to productivity growth (Calvino, Reijerink and Samek, 2025).
Broadening the scope from innovation and technology adoption to investment in new capital goods, other research could expand the analysis of determinants of investment in capital and its slowdown in the last two decades across many OECD economies, with special attention to the distinction between tangible and intangible capital. The efficient allocation of production factors would call for renewed focus on factors enabling business dynamism, and in particular sound competition frameworks, for both the product and labour markets. While the importance of competition is an old truth in studies of productivity growth, competition will continue to require attention, for example in the context of growing investment in knowledge-based capital, that can be used to guard firms against competitors, or to strengthen firms’ market power (Calligaris, Criscuolo and Marcolin, 2024a, 2024b). Key research questions would therefore include the long-term impact of constraints to competition on productivity growth, as mediated by decreased business investment. Ongoing GFP work for 2025-26 is already exploring how competition in the product market is affecting the link between a firm’s productivity and its investments, for firms at the frontier of productivity as well as laggard firms.
Ageing and demographic change
A second area of future work concerns ageing and demographic change. Most advanced countries face rapidly ageing populations, which will depress labour supply. Recent OECD analysis finds that even substantial extensions of working life (through later retirement, higher participation or healthy ageing) would only partially mitigate the impact of ageing on employment and per-capita GDP growth (André, Gal and Schief 2024). Productivity gains or capital deepening are therefore warranted. But ageing can also affect productivity directly: an older workforce may have different skill mixes or be slower to adopt new technologies, and care and health expenditures may crowd out productivity-enhancing investment. At the same time, ageing can create incentives to innovation. Empirical research is still developing on the net effect of ageing on productivity (both labour and multifactor productivity) and the channels at work. André, Gal and Schief (2024) stress that policies need to adapt to demographic trends by promoting lifelong learning, labour mobility across age groups, and changes in managerial practices that are more favourable to the employment of the elderly. Future work could quantify the scope for productivity growth to sustain living standards as the labour force shrinks, and identify which reforms (e.g. training older workers, adjusting retirement rules, or changing management practices) can most effectively support productivity in ageing societies. Other key questions would look at the relationship between ageing and the propensity of an economy to innovate, the types and direction of innovation, automation or adoption of new technologies, which can further fuel productivity growth. This will most likely require better access to micro datasets containing information on workers’ age and skills as well as firms’ characteristics and economic outcomes (e.g. linked employer–employee datasets).
Decarbonisation and adaptation
A third emerging theme is the green transition’s impact on productivity. Shifting to a low-carbon, resource-efficient economy can entail large reallocation of capital and labour. In the short run, there may be trade-offs: for example, higher energy and carbon prices raise production costs, which can initially reduce employment for some firms that are not able to adapt (Dechezleprêtre, Nachtigall and Stadler, 2020). OECD research on energy shocks shows that following a sharp rise in energy prices, the productivity of the average firm falls in the short run, as capacity utilisation is cut back. However, in the medium term such shocks can spur new investment and employment losses can get re-absorbed (André et al. 2023). Ongoing OECD analysis also shows that small firms and initially less productive firms see productivity gains from an energy price shock, while large and already productive firms see no significant impact. An interesting question going forward is therefore whether decarbonisation can help reduce within-sector productivity divergence.
More broadly, the green transition will redraw industry boundaries. Sectors with heavy emissions are bound to shrink, while green-tech sectors will grow. The net productivity effect of these structural shifts is uncertain. It depends on whether new green industries are inherently less or more productive, and on how quickly workers and capital can move into the growing green sectors. Within industries, certain jobs have a greater content of green tasks (Keese and Marcolin, 2023; OECD, 2024c). Recent work at the GFP (Scholl, Turban and Gal, 2023) examined the readiness of their workforce to master green tasks. Many jobs entail many tasks that are highly relevant for the green transition (e.g. recycling) and likely to become more important in the future. Analysing how these jobs are distributed across firms of different productivity levels revealed that, for the average medium-productivity firm, increasing the share of green jobs to the level of the frontier firm would entail 1 to 3% higher productivity growth. This suggests that environmental and productivity goals may align for frontier firms.
Future research could further expand the analysis of how the green transformation affects productivity growth. For example, the heterogeneity of investment in green technologies in entering, surviving or exiting firms - even within narrowly defined industries is still largely unknown, and will contribute to determine aggregate productivity dynamics. Similarly, more attention to the impact of the green transition on productivity dispersion is warranted, both within and between sectors.
Empirical studies using firm-level data – for instance linking carbon abatement investments to productivity outcomes – will be critical and so will be the availability of improved data on energy usage, emissions, and green investment. These data would also enable the analysis of the role of public policies that incentivise green innovation and investment (including subsidies for green technology adoption, carbon pricing and regulations) to ensure that labour productivity and carbon emissions reductions go hand in hand. Lastly, future productivity growth will be simultaneously affected by ongoing decarbonisation efforts and adaptation to climate-related shocks – an area that remains largely unexplored and represents an important avenue for future work.
Global value chains and resilience
A related set of questions concerns resilience, supply chains and risks related to the global integration of markets. For much of the post-war era, deeper integration of global value chains has boosted productivity by allowing countries and firms to specialise, access foreign technologies or higher-quality inputs, or simply reduce costs and free resources for investment. Yet recent shocks – the COVID-19 pandemic, growing geopolitical tensions, and natural disasters – have exposed vulnerabilities of the system of cross-border integration of production. This has renewed interest in balancing efficiency with resilience. An open question is therefore whether efforts to diversify and “de-risk” supply chains will affect productivity growth (efficiency-robustness trade-off). On one hand, redundancies (e.g. multiple suppliers, higher inventory) can raise costs; on the other hand, innovation can stand as a complement to diversification and can simultaneously reduce dependencies and increase productivity growth (e.g. see Dechezleprêtre et al., 2024, for the renewable energy industrial ecosystem). Lastly, productivity can also be the reason why the network of some firms is more resilient to shocks than others (Kawakubo and Suzuki, 2022).
For productivity research, important tasks include mapping critical dependencies and studying how shocks propagate through multi-stage production, as in Green et al. (2025). Access to multi-country firm data with firm-to-firm linkages would help quantify how diversification of suppliers or markets alters productivity. This also raises questions about public policy: what is the role of government in securing critical inputs without stifling trade and productivity growth? The OECD has begun to develop policy toolkits for supply-chain resilience (e.g. OECD, 2025), but more evidence is needed on best practices (such as stockpiling, public–private coordination or regulatory standards) and their productivity implications.
Methodological and measurement challenges
Underlying all these themes are methodological and data challenges. Productivity research increasingly relies on micro-level data (firm, plant and worker data) to capture heterogeneity and the complexity of capabilities that interact to produce productivity growth. Continued expansion of access to such microdata is essential. Recent OECD analyses have shown the value of linked employer–employee datasets in uncovering relationships between workforce composition (skills, tasks, demographics) and firm productivity (Criscuolo et al., 2021b). As noted by Cavassini et al. (2022), access to detailed microdata on firms and workers is crucial for productivity institutions to ground their policy advice in evidence. Future work should continue building shared data resources, such as harmonised productivity databases, multi-country firm surveys and the linking of production data with other relevant dimensions (e.g. linked employer-employee data, VAT data capturing firm production networks).
At the same time, important measurement gaps in the productivity domain persist (OECD, 2024c). A typical example is the ability to capture the productivity benefits of ICT in a digital economy: data often do not fully capture output of free digital services or the role of intangible capital (data, software, R&D) in production (OECD, 2013). Improving measurement of intangibles, network effects, and digital goods is an ongoing task, although getting them right is unlikely to reverse the current productivity slowdown (Syverson, 2017). Similarly, better metrics are needed for services and the public sector, where quantity and quality of outputs are hard to measure. The importance of public sector productivity for the productivity of businesses could also be explored. Moreover, as new challenges emerge, novel indicators may be needed, as in the case of green investment metrics or AI adoption rates. Innovation in data collection (e.g. using big data, web-scraping, or experimental surveys) may help to fill these gaps. Ensuring data on such topics are reliable and internationally comparable will support rigorous analysis.
Pro-productivity institutions
The final area for future GFP work focuses on policy and institutional design. Many countries have adopted or reformed institutions dedicated to productivity (productivity boards, councils or commissions). Surveys of these institutions indicate that - when well designed and funded - they can improve the policy debate and help coordinate reforms. Questions remain, however, about how to optimise their structure and mandate. Recent OECD work underscores two key factors: first, such institutions need analytical independence and adequate resources (including access to data) to be credible and effective. Second, regular evaluation of policies is vital (Renda and Dougherty, 2017; Cavassini et al., 2022). In the future, the GFP could produce further analysis on the mechanisms that enhance the effectiveness of productivity councils, as well as undertake greater capacity-building efforts for institutions that may request them. Additionally, future research could improve the evaluation of such policies, either by embedding randomised pilots in reform programmes or via rigorous ex-post evaluations of government interventions (such as business support or regulation changes).
In sum, the productivity agenda of the future is broad and multifaceted. It spans the digital transformation and AI, demographic shifts, environmental sustainability, global integration, and data and policy innovations. For each area, critical questions remain open. Addressing these will require research, new data collections, and collaboration between governments and academia – all of which is in the mandate of the Global Forum on Productivity. By tackling these open questions, the OECD and policymakers across countries can better design the next generation of reforms to reignite productivity growth and improve living standards.
The past decade has confirmed that the revival of productivity growth across OECD and non-OECD economies is a complex challenge, which is increasingly linked to broader structural transformations in the global economy. In this context, the Global Forum on Productivity has provided a platform for evidence-based research and peer learning among OECD and partner countries.
By combining micro-level analysis with a cross-country perspective, the GFP has contributed to a deeper understanding of productivity dynamics and their policy determinants. Its work has addressed a wide range of topics, including the role of frontier and laggard firms, global value chains, technological diffusion, labour market adjustment, and the implications of demographic and environmental transitions for productivity.
For 2025-26, members have selected a workstream focused on market competition, investment and productivity. A firm-level analysis will explore how investment reacts to productivity differently, in firms at different parts of the productivity distribution, so that one can establish whether the recent slowdown in investment is mostly due to frontier or laggard firms. The project will also explore the role of competition in providing incentives for business investment, and whether these can be strengthened by public policies.
The contributions of the GFP have informed national policy discussions and catalysed further research within both governments and the academic community.6 The GFP has therefore not only served its membership directly, but also catalysed additional work, further deepening the understanding of productivity and its drivers.
In providing a space for structured exchange of policy experiences, the GFP has encouraged transparency, mutual learning and broader institutional development. Its ability to bring together policy practitioners, researchers and statistical experts from a broad range of countries has strengthened the evidence base for productivity-related policymaking. To fulfil its mission as a platform to share knowledge and best practices, the GFP is now proactively engaging national productivity institutions to support their development and effectiveness.
As new challenges emerge —ranging from digitalisation and artificial intelligence to ageing, climate change and global uncertainty— the GFP is more relevant than ever. Continued participation in the Forum offers members the opportunity to engage in joint analysis, contribute to the shaping of research priorities, and benefit from comparative insights on what works to support sustainable productivity growth.
References
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Adalet McGowan, M., D. Andrews and V. Millot (2017), “The Walking Dead?: Zombie Firms and Productivity Performance in OECD Countries”, OECD Economics Department Working Papers, No. 1372, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/180d80ad-en.
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← 1. See the OECD (2015b) scoping paper for the GFP. The GFP was created by the OECD Economics Department and the Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation, and endorsed by their respective OECD committees (Economic Policy Committee, Committee on Industry, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development Review Committee).
← 2. These areas of work encompass most dimensions of productivity policy that are described in the framework André and Gal (2024) put forward to explain aggregate productivity growth and its policies. Similarly, the framework developed by Van Ark et al. (2023) organises pro-productivity policies into four main categories: (a) factor accumulation (e.g. GFP work on human capital); (b) markets and resource allocation (e.g. on the divergence of frontier and non-frontier firms); (c) technological and structural change (e.g. on telework and human capital for technology adoption); and (d) internationalisation (e.g. on global value chains).
← 3. Centrality is measured at the country-industry level and is a relative measure, reflecting the influence of a given country-industry relative to all other country-industries in the value chain. The mean overall (domestic and foreign centrality) is equal to unity in each year, by construction. The plotted measure of centrality is a relative measure, and an increase in centrality does not mean that a country-industry is absolutely more central, but rather relatively more central compared to other country-industries in the network.
← 4. The statistical data for Israel are supplied by and under the responsibility of the relevant Israeli authorities. The use of such data by the OECD is without prejudice to the status of the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem and Israeli settlements in the West Bank under the terms of international law.
← 6. For example, by May 2025, the two key GFP papers on frontier firms (Andrews, Criscuolo and Gal, 2015; 2016) had been cited more than 630 times each (Google Scholar). The GFP work on global value chains (Criscuolo and Timmis, 2018a; 2018b) had been cited almost 400 times, followed by the work on industry concentration (Bajgar et al., 2019 and versions published elsewhere) with almost 270 citations, and the work on telework (Criscuolo et al., 2021c; Adrjan et al., 2021) with almost 170 citations.