Productivity cooling as gains from tech boom fade

Four years into an expansion, the productivity of American workers has slowed and some economists say there are few signs it will soon rebound.
Employee output per hour grew at an average 0.7 percent annual rate over the past 12 quarters, which economists at JPMorgan Chase & Co. say is a pace so slow it’s rarely seen outside of recessions. Gains since the recovery began in June 2009 have averaged 1.5 percent, the weakest of the nine postwar expansions that lasted as long, according to IHS Global Insight.
One reason is that companies have been slow to boost spending on more sophisticated machinery and time-saving devices such as faster computers — a driver of the late 1990s boom in productivity. Without bigger gains in efficiency, it will be difficult for economic growth to gain momentum, and worker pay may suffer even as businesses are spurred to boost hiring in the short term.
“Productivity is having a very slow run,” said Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan Chase in New York. After an initial surge in 2009, “it’s been pretty disappointing since then. It means the economy’s speed limit might be lower than we thought.”
The pace at which an economy can grow without stoking inflation, which economists term its speed limit, reflects the rate of growth of the labor force plus how much each worker can produce. Smaller gains in productivity therefore mean advances in gross domestic product will also be restrained.
When the U.S. economy slumped during the last recession, business investment in equipment and software plunged even more, causing its share of GDP to shrink to 6.4 percent by mid-2009, almost a four-decade low. At 7.5 percent in this year’s first quarter, the share is still below both its pre-recession level and the record 9.6 percent reached in mid-2000, during the productivity boom. “The pace of technological improvement isn’t progressing as much,” and “computing power isn’t growing as fast,” Feroli said. “We need to see stronger, sustained growth in investment spending.”
Erik Johnson, a senior U.S. economist for IHS Global in Lexington, Mass., agreed. “Maybe we’re plateauing a bit in terms of the kind of gains we could get” out of digital technology advances, he said. In addition, lackluster demand and fiscal policy uncertainty mean “large capital projects that massively help supply chains and efficiency within companies have gone to the backburner.”
As a result, productivity is languishing, and Johnson projects it will increase 0.5 percent this year. He forecasts it will “slowly drift up” to an average 1.6 percent increase in the next 10 years.
That is still well-short of recent history. From 1996 through 2004, worker output per hour rose 3.1 percent a year on average, according to figures from the Labor Department.
The plunge in prices of computing equipment during that time “gave companies the incentive to invest,” said Stephen Oliner, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and an economist at the Federal Reserve Board from 1984 to 2011.
In addition, semiconductor manufacturing was in a phase of rapid innovation, and the marriage of computers and communication technology lifted efficiency, he said. •

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