The Global Forum on Productivity at 10

Executive summary

The widespread slowdown in productivity growth since the early 21^st century represents one of the most pressing challenges facing economic policymakers today, hampering nations' capacity to improve living standards and maintain a competitive advantage. As the OECD Global Forum on Productivity (GFP) marks its 10^th anniversary, this book reflects on the Forum’s achievements and outlines key priorities for the years ahead. Since its creation in 2015, the GFP has established itself as a platform for international collaboration on productivity, helping governments understand and address the persistent slowdown in productivity growth observed across many economies worldwide. Through its unique combination of empirical research, stakeholders gathering, and policy dialogue, the GFP has advanced both the evidence base and the institutional foundations for productivity-enhancing reforms.

Key past contributions

GFP’s research work over the years provided important contributions to the existing frontier of knowledge in several fields of productivity analysis, of which five themes emerge with clarity: the role of frontier firms, innovation diffusion and business dynamism; the effect of global value chains on firm productivity; the human side of productivity; the determinants of adoption of technology, including telework, and the role of pro-productivity institutions. These five research areas form a cohesive framework for understanding productivity growth. They are some of the elements that shape the pace, direction, and societal consequences of productivity growth.

Through the five interconnected thematic areas and its other research contributions, the GFP expanded the methodological tools and data infrastructure available for productivity analysis. By promoting the use of firm-level microdata, the GFP has enabled a more detailed and nuanced understanding of the distributional dynamics of productivity and highlighted underlying heterogeneity overlooked in macro-level statistics. The Forum also pioneered the use of linked employer-employee datasets, allowing researchers to jointly examine firm productivity, worker characteristics, skills, labour mobility, and management practices. In parallel, it has generated new data through targeted surveys, including on telework and labour market shortages, filling critical gaps and informing timely policy debates.

Work carried out under the GFP programme has had wide influence, contributing to analytical efforts both within the OECD and in national institutions. Its insights have shaped country-level productivity reviews and OECD Economic Surveys, and supported capacity-building initiatives across countries, thus reinforcing the foundations for evidence-based policymaking. GFP research has also been featured in major OECD flagship publications and integrated into high-level policy dialogues, while informing reform debates at the national level. For example, the outcomes of GFP work on skills for productivity were used in multiple OECD Economic Surveys (e.g., France 2021; New Zealand 2021), Innovation Reviews (Germany 2022), Industrial Strategy Review (Slovenia, 2025), or in the OECD Going for Growth publication (2023). In all these contexts, GFP work has helped draw policymakers’ attention to the significant heterogeneity among firms and workers, even within narrowly defined segments of the economy, and the consequent need for tailored policy interventions.

Key findings from these five workstreams

Frontier Firms and Business Dynamism: Building on the early finding that productivity gaps between high and low productivity firms had been widening, the GFP demonstrated that firms at the global productivity frontier experienced robust productivity growth throughout the 2000s, whilst divergence with laggard firms increased substantially. Follow-up analyses further documented rising industry concentration across Europe and North America, contributing to debates about declining business dynamism and changing competitive dynamics. These findings highlighted the critical role of well-designed framework policies in sharpening firms' incentives and capabilities for technological adoption and promoting resource reallocation towards more productive enterprises.

Motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the GFP conducted a deep-dive on adoption of telework practices, and its productivity implications. A cross-country survey of social partners revealed that realising the full productivity benefits of hybrid work requires substantial managerial changes and complementary investments. In synergy with other OECD work on ICT adoption and productivity, this stream of work enhanced the understanding of the key drivers of diffusion of technology and new business models.

Firm Internationalisation and Global Value Chains: The GFP used novel centrality metrics from graph theory to identify sectors and countries that serve as influential hubs within global production networks. This work demonstrated profound structural changes in global value chains between 1995 and 2011, with several emerging economies, particularly in Eastern Europe, becoming increasingly central to global production. GFP research established that becoming more influential within GVC networks particularly benefits smaller and non-frontier firms, with productivity gains strongest in countries with flexible labour markets. The findings underscored that traditional policies encouraging GVC integration remain important for productivity growth, whilst the composition of buyer and supplier networks significantly affects spillovers to non-frontier firms.

Human Side of Productivity: GFP's ambitious project on human capital analysed administrative linked employer-employee datasets covering millions of firms and workers across ten countries. This research demonstrated that top-performing firms employ almost twice the share of high-skilled employees as the least productive firms, whilst revealing that country-specific patterns allow different skill strategies at the productivity frontier. The analysis showed that adjusting workforce composition - including skills, management practices, and diversity - could close productivity gaps between frontier and laggard firms by approximately one third. Subsequent work found that increasing female representation in senior management raises productivity growth, particularly for firms with low levels of female participation.

Labour Shortages: Further research based on a new GFP Employer Survey highlighted the pervasive nature of labour shortages among firms globally and showed that they are more likely to emerge in firms that adopt new technologies, are younger and less productive and offering worse job quality. Frontier firms also experience shortages, but are more likely to invest in automation, workforce training and internal re-organisation to compensate. Using new macro evidence, furthermore, GFP research highlighted the role of structural factors—such as population ageing, digitalisation, decarbonisation, and the rise of artificial intelligence—in driving persistent increases in labour markets tightness since the global financial crisis.

Pro-Productivity Institutions: The GFP systematically analysed the design and effectiveness of productivity institutions across multiple countries, developing analytical frameworks to assess their key characteristics and contributions to policy processes. This research established that well-designed pro-productivity institutions can significantly improve policy quality and political debate when they possess analytical independence, adequate resources, and connections to policy-making processes.

Future perspectives

Looking ahead, the GFP envisions an ambitious research agenda to address emerging challenges and opportunities whilst revisiting questions which remain important. Priority areas include:

• Artificial Intelligence and Technology Diffusion: Understanding how AI affects productivity across different types of firms, examining the determinants of technology adoption and investment more broadly, and analysing the effect of diffusion on leading versus laggard firms.

• Demographic Change and Ageing: Quantifying how population ageing affects productivity growth through changes in the workforce composition, firms’ propensity to innovate, or capital-labour substitution, among other channels.

• Decarbonisation and Adaptation: Analysing how environmental policies and investments in industrial decarbonisation and adaptation affect productivity growth and productivity dispersion across firms within sectors.

• Global Value Chains and Resilience: Examining potential trade-offs between efficiency and resilience in supply chain organisation and understanding how diversification efforts affect productivity outcomes.

• Measurement and Data Challenges: Addressing persistent gaps in measuring intangible capital, digital services, public sector productivity and productivity of services, whilst expanding access to firm-level microdata and linked datasets.

In addition, the GFP will continue its efforts to strengthen the institutional capacity for productivity policymaking. Over the past decade, its work has informed national productivity reviews, supported capacity building in both OECD and partner countries, and shaped international policy discussions. Going forward, it will aim to further support productivity institutions—such as national boards and councils—by sharing best practices, developing tools for policy evaluation, and promoting analytical independence and data access.

Productivity remains a central pillar of economic resilience and long-term growth, the GFP’s mission remains as relevant today as it was a decade ago: to support countries in designing and implementing reforms that deliver lasting productivity gains and improved living standards for all. With the support of its contributing countries and entities, the GFP will continue to serve as a hub for cutting-edge research and policy dialogue.