Title: The law of increasing productivity

Authors: Piero Mella

Addresses: Department of Business and Economics, University of Pavia, Pavia, 27100, Italy

Abstract: I propose the following 'law of increasing productivity': the search for the highest levels of return on equity necessary to produce value for the shareholders and meet the expectations of the firms' stakeholders gives rise to an improvement process whose macro effect is increasing levels of productivity and quality. This paper will try to demonstrate that productivity is the basis of all productive systems, which are viewed as transformers of utility and value, since the search for maximum productive efficiency is necessary to reduce production costs and thus to produce value. After presenting a coherent frame of reference, I shall examine the drivers of productivity and then move on to discuss the consequences of the continual growth in productivity. The paper concludes with a simple but significant model that seeks to illustrate the relationship between productivity and employment.

Keywords: productivity; quality; productivity levers; intrinsic drivers; managerial drivers; extrinsic drivers; dynamics of productivity; world robot population; global production network; jobless economy.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMABS.2018.097899

International Journal of Markets and Business Systems, 2018 Vol.3 No.4, pp.297 - 316

Received: 05 Apr 2018
Accepted: 13 Jun 2018
Published online: 22 Feb 2019 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article