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Originally Posted by Yakk
That's a strange measure. Normally you measure change in GDP. Productivity growth is change in GDP per worker (or maybe per worker-hour, I forgot).
Don't know what to call "change in GDP per capita".
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We are basically saying the same thing.
By measuring the change in per-capita GDP, immigration is removed from the equation.
We could have a significant increase in GDP, but also have an even bigger increase in immigration.
While the higher GDP numbers would look better, they really aren't because the numbers were affected by a much larger pool of people.
i.e. GDP increases (hypothetically) 3% from 2004 to 2005, but per-capita GDP only increases 0.5%. What does that tell us?
Conversely, the higher the per-capita GDP change, the better we know our economy is doing.
From the World Bank:
But to judge a country's level of economic development, these indicators have to be divided by the country's population.