Data and code for: "World Productivity: 1996 - 2014"

We use a new growth accounting method to quantify the drivers of world total factor productivity (TFP) growth during 1996-2014 and uncover four main results. World productivity growth is volatile from year to year. This mainly reflects reallocation of labor across country-industries. The contribution of country-industry level productivity growth to world productivity is relatively constant over time. This constancy masks that the increased importance of emerging economies offset a productivity slowdown in advanced economies. After 2008, this offsetting effect dissipated and world TFP growth declined. These conclusions are robust to the inclusion of markups in the analysis.