National Productivity Week 27th January 2025 | Visit Website

A diverse community of leading experts, policymakers and practitioners

The Institute’s key research themes are led by ten academic partners spread across the UK.

Working closely with policymakers

We’re a UK-wide research organisation exploring what productivity means for business

Businesses are crucial to solving the UK’s productivity problems.

Research

Environmentally-adjusted productivity estimates in the UK

This project uses various data sources to provide a range of measures of productivity that account for environmental issues. It involves the construction of energy-productivity and emissions-productivity metrics (where energy and emissions are the ‘inputs’ in place of traditional inputs like labour and capital). It also develops approaches to construct environmentally-adjusted labour productivity, where the output is adjusted for emissions (a bad output) or efforts to reduce emissions (a good, currently unmeasured, non-market output). This is in the spirit of previous work by the OECD and others.

Novel to this project is such analysis at an industry level. OECD work looked only at country aggregates, but this study looks at whether the slowdown in emissions over time in the UK can be explained by changing industrial-structure or increases in emissions-productivity within industries, as well as evaluating whether some industries are making proportionately more effort to reduce emissions than others.

Project lead Josh Martin (The Bank of England)

Collaborator  Matthew Agarwala (Cambridge University)