Comparative in British and Ame rican Manufacturing

by Bart van Ark* * University of Groningen. I am most grateful to Nienke Beintema for her assistance in making the detailed comparisons, and to Mary O’Mahony for providing me with a substantial part of the British data base. Comments on earlier drafts were made by Martin Baily, Andrew Britton, Steve Broadberry, Angus Maddison, Geoff Mason, Nicholas Oulton, Dirk Pilat, Sig Prais and by an anonymous referee, for which I am most grateful. This article presents the results of a benchmark comparison of the relative level of manufacturing productivity in the United Kingdom and the United States for 1987. It shows value added per hour worked in the UK at 58 per cent of the corresponding level in the United States. The UK appears to show relatively high productivity levels in basic goods industries, including textiles, chemicals and basic metals. The benchmark results are extrapolated backwards to 1968 and forwards to 1990, showing a narrowing of some ten percentage points of the productivity gap between the two countries. It is also shown that differences in capital intensity account for only a small part of the productivity gap. 1