Labor Productivity and Increasing the Efficiency of National Economic Systems: Cross-Country Comparison

Abstract

The problem of measuring the efficiency of social production is inseparable from the problem of measuring labor productivity. The efficiency of the production use of material resources, expressed as the ratio of the useful result of labor directly to its corresponding costs, reflected in the physical volume of GDP of the countries of the world, is presented in the work as labor productivity. The author selected 12 different countries. The necessary statistical indicators was recalculated from material resources to labor. Using factorial and correlation-regression analysis, the problem of quantitative assessment (in weight terms) and its interpretation as a measure of labor productivity impact on the efficiency of the economies of a number of countries in 2011–2020 is solved. The results of the study confirmed the hypotheses, providing increase in the role of labor productivity in achieving the efficiency of using the production resources in national economic systems. It was empirically proven that national economic systems that differ not in the maximum amount of resources, but in the most balanced combination of different types of resources involved, have a relatively greater efficiency. The place of Russia as an economy characterized by the optimal value of the effect of social production equal to one is noted, which contributes to the relatively successful development of its economic system, subject to active structural restructuring of the economy in favor of sectors that increase labor productivity.