Comments by Sung-Chun Jung,  on The Global Productivity Slump:  Common and Country-Specific Factors

Sung-Chun Jung: The global economy has not seen strong recoveries since the 2008 global financial crisis. Many economists have been pointing to the global productivity slump as one of the main reasons for this, trying to identify the deeper roots for slowdowns of TFP growth. This research paper falls into this group and provides us with a promising and hopeful message on the future of our global economy. The key questions in the paper are “whether this phenomenon of sharply lower productivity growth is unprecedented, whether it is likely to last, which countries are most susceptible, and what can be done about it.” The results provided here relieve some of the concerns for the future of the global economy. TFP slumps are ubiquitous. They could take place at any time in any place because of a variety of economic and non-economic shocks, including global and country-specific factors. We thus do...