Preface by the Asian Productivity Organization
A country’s productivity performance is central to its standard of living. While strong, sustained productivity growth is an important foundation of a resilient economy, attaining it can be elusive as productivity opportunities are uncertain in nature and timing. Adverse events such as the global pandemic, which has decelerated growth trends, weaken not only national productivity performance but also its drivers. As the crisis has changed the way we work, countries need to focus on productivity drivers to achieve sustainable, inclusive recovery.
The APO seeks “inclusive, innovation-led productivity growth in Asia and the Pacific” under its Vision 2025 to address the latest challenges confronting the region and individual member countries and meet its members’ evolving expectations. One the four priority targets of the vision emphasizes the importance of leveraging new drivers of productivity. In today’s extraordinary circumstances, productivity improvement efforts must yield extraordinary results. New drivers that include innovation, advanced technologies, and digitalization are expected to lead to exponential productivity gains. With the addition of inclusive productivity by expanding the outreach and targets, the gains will be broad based and benefit the entire society. Together with efforts to strengthen productivity-promoting institutions by equipping them to be policy partners for their governments, those priorities are the backbone of APO endeavors to enhance productivity in the region.
This publication is the second resulting from a collaboration between the APO and OECD started in October 2019 with the main objective of developing improved, more comparable productivity statistics on their member economies. To complement the previous report on improving productivity measurement, this report focuses on multifactor productivity and explores the roles of drivers of productivity in economic growth. It is hoped that innovative policies can be derived from this research to invigorate productivity initiatives.
The APO looks forward to deepening collaboration with the OECD in putting productivity in the forefront of socioeconomic development.
