Verdoorn’s Law: Some Notes on Output Measurement and the Role of Demand

Abstract

The issues that I discuss in this chapter, and that appear in the title, might be viewed at being first as independent of one another. In particular, the first one (output measurement) may seem to be quite untheoretical; and the second one might be expected to contribute little to a school of thought, namely the Kaldorian one, which has already, over many decades, stressed the importance of the demand side of the economy. However, I hope to show that coupling some observations drawn from both parts may help in developing a viewpoint about the Verdoorn effect which, although somewhat unconventional, might be useful in interpreting some actual productivity trends that have been observed in the advanced industrial economies.