5 October 2004

Productivity in the UK 5: Benchmarking UK Productivity Performance

A Consultation on Productivity Indicators

The Government consulted on moving towards a focused set of national productivity indicators in order to benchmark the UK’s productivity performance against its main competitors more effectively. The consultation document proposed a set of intermediate indicators of producivity based around the ‘five drivers’ framework. The document invited views on the following areas:

The proposal to move towards a focused set of productivity indicators that could be used to track progress towards the specific objective of raising the rate of UK productivity growth over the economic cycle, and narrowing the productivity gap with its competitors.
The proposed set of indicators, and underlying data, to monitor progress on the five drivers of productivity.
The applicability of using a similar set of productivity indicators to monitor progress at a regional level.
The methodology used to calculate the evolution of the productivity gap over time.

The consultation opened on 15th March 2004 and closed on 4th June 2004, and was jointly conducted by the Department of Trade and Industry and HM Treasury.

The Government's Response to the Consultation on Productivity Indicators

This report outlines the Government’s response to the consultation. The Government will monitor changes in the national productivity indicators summarised in Box 1 of this report. The indicators will serve to highlight how the UK is performing relative to its major competitors on key dimensions of each of the five drivers of productivity. The new set of national productivity indicators and the underlying data can be viewed at www.dti.gov.uk/competitiveness from 1st November 2004. The indicators will be updated regularly and will benchmark the UK’s performance against the US, France, and Germany.

The Government will also monitor changes in the regional productivity indicators, summarised in Box 2 of this report, for each of the UK nations and regions. The indicators will be made available at www.rcu.gov.uk/reppsa .

Both the consutaltion document and the Government’s response are available below in Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF). If you do not have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer you can download the software free of charge from the Adobe website. For alternative ways to read PDF documents and further information on website accessibility visit the HM Treasury accessibility page .

Media links

External links

DTI UK Productivity and Competitiveness Indicators 2003 http://www.dti.gov.uk/economics