ABSTRACT
Whilst Soviet leaders and commentators, as well as those in the West, agree that ‘productivity’ and especially ‘labour productivity’ are currently the key to economic advance, what these terms entail and how they are to be achieved are matters of ambiguity and dispute. Discussions of ‘productivity’ involve the whole gamut of features of economic life. As Salter has put it, in ‘the interpretation of even the simplest measures of productivity arises a host of very complex problems. For behind productivity lie all the dynamic forces of economic life: technical progress, [capital] accumulation, enterprise, and the institutional pattern of society.’1
