Out of Steam?

摘要

A dip in U.S. productivity provokes anxious questions. The West: does it signal the end of the global boom? Y ALL ACCOUNTS, THE NEW ECONOMY DIED THREE or four years ago. Business cycles do exist Share prices can fall Companies eventually have to makemoney. Bubbles burst. But one aspect of the roaring 90s survived and, indeed, thrived. Investment in new technol-ogy helped America produce twice as much pernour worked as it had in the previous quarter century. Productivity grew, on average 1.5 percentannually from 1973 to 1995. It leaped to 2.5 percent in the second half of the '90s and continued to climb even after the boom ended in 2000. IT spending ground to a halt, but productivity rose a staggering annual 4.3 percent between 2001 and 2003. And then? On Feb. 3, the U.S. Labor Department reported that productivity edged up in the fourth quarter by a mere 0.8 percent, after a weak third quarter. Suddenly, a familiar question is back in vogue: Has new technology truly raised the long-term productivity rate? Or could this signal the end of the U.S. miracle?