O exemplo que somos.

A revista "The Mckinsey Quarterly" no seu segundo número de 2007, inclui um interessante artigo sobre a sobre a produtividade na Europa "Europe's productivity challenge" da autoria de Heino Fassbender.



O autor, ao tentar explicar a lacuna entre a progressão da produtividade na Europa e nos Estados Unidos escreve:



"The true gap in labor productivity between the two regions is probably even bigger than official statistics suggest. They do not, for instance, take into account the impact of Europe’s lower employment levels, which exclude more of the least productive workers—those with limited skills and experience who are the first ones laid off. If the average unemployed person in the European Union is, say, 30 percent less productive than his or her employed counterpart, the official statistics overstate productivity, at least at levels close to full employment, by approximately 4 percent.


Large shares of so-called output in Europe, moreover, do not reflect real economic activity. In business, economic output is measured by market outcomes: the difference between the value of goods and services sold and their inputs. But that doesn’t apply to public-sector workers such as teachers, the police, firefighters, or tax collectors. In their case statisticians simply add up salaries and assume that the resulting sum equals the total value of their services. When Europe’s public sector accounted for a small proportion of GDP, measurements of the sector’s output mattered much less. Today, when governments employ large numbers of people—almost one-fifth of Portugal’s total employed population, for instance—it produces big distortions."



1/5 ... makes me wonder. Como diria Vale e Azevedo... 1/5 é 1/5.