Closing Europe’s productivity gap

“Productivity isn’t everything, but, in the long run, it is almost everything,” Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman once quipped. It’s a phrase that’s been doing the rounds in Europe recently as new figures show that the continent’s productivity gap with the US is widening. It’s a point of concern because “real wage growth is closely linked to productivity growth”, notes Pawel Adrjan, director of EMEA & APAC economic research at Indeed. “It’s not only about making money,” adds Ester Barendregt, chief economist at RaboResearch, “but without productivity growth, other social goals become harder to achieve”.