ABSTRACT
Up until the onset of the financial crisis, UK performance looked better than that of many other European countries. There are many ways to decompose the factors behind this better performance, and we compare two approaches, both of which are related to an evaluation of input quantity and quality. The first involves the use of growth accounting, and the second the estimation of a cross-country panel regression. We have combined these approaches previously in Barrell, Holland, Liadze and Pomerantz (2007, 2009), but for a different set of countries over a shorter period, and hence our work extends our previous discussions.
