Productivity Levels in Transport, Storage and Communication: A New ICOP 1997 Data Set

Abstract

This working paper provides industry-specific purchasing power parities for gross output in the transportation and communication sector. The calculation of these output PPPs builds on earlier work by the International Comparisons of Output and Productivity (ICOP) project in this field. The paper reviews the existing methods and develops a new system which takes full advantage of the improved data situation. The study captures the transportation and communication sectors of 32 countries (EU-25, Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Taiwan and United States). The second part of the paper applies the PPPs to productivity measures obtained from the EU KLEMS database and the 60-industry Database of the Groningen Growth and development Centre. This results in a consistent and comparable set of productivity levels at detailed industry level. We find that differences in productivity between the United States and other industrialized countries are only partly due to differences in industry structure. The United States especially outperform the EU-15 and Asia on productivity levels in land transport. Eastern European countries are still showing much lower productivity levels, except for land transport where they can become a though competitor for the former EU-15.