What is productivity?
Productivity is about ‘working smarter’ rather than ‘working harder’
Productivity is a measure of how much output we produce from a given quantity of inputs.
It’s about how well people – individuals, businesses, communities – combine resources to produce goods and services.
Countries think about productivity as a comparison of national output – Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – to a measure of inputs (for example hours worked). It’s about how good countries are at turning their inputs – resources – into outputs. That is, how productive they are.
Productivity matters for wellbeing. Achieving higher productivity – producing more with what we have (people, knowledge, skills, produced capital, and natural resources) – means there is more to go around for current and future generations.