{"id":319170,"date":"2025-08-05T06:55:14","date_gmt":"2025-08-05T06:55:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/319170\/"},"modified":"2025-08-05T06:55:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-05T06:55:14","slug":"paul-macflynn-productivity-is-not-an-issue-of-worker-effort-but-a-matter-of-the-quality-of-firms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/319170\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul MacFlynn: Productivity is not an issue of worker effort, but a matter of the quality of firms"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Labour productivity is an important economic indicator (Getty Images)\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/f9701983-ae83-43b2-84e6-7c41e007ae4d.jpg\" loading=\"eager\" width=\"100%\" data-testid=\"article-image\"  \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"beltel-ebe0ecc6_root beltel-ebe0ecc6_caption1 beltel-300db776_none beltel-91174671_secondary beltel-66f0fec7_regular beltel-1d70522a_marginbottom0 beltel-1d70522a_marginleft0 beltel-1d70522a_marginright0 beltel-1d70522a_margintop3 beltel-b48c4984_left\" style=\"color:var(--color-grey-60)\">Labour productivity is an important economic indicator (Getty Images)<\/p>\n<p class=\"beltel-ebe0ecc6_root beltel-ebe0ecc6_paragraph beltel-300db776_none beltel-91174671_primary beltel-1d70522a_marginbottom0 beltel-1d70522a_margintop0 beltel-b48c4984_inherit\" style=\"color:var(--color-primary-80)\">When the Northern Ireland Executive was restored last year, the-then new Economy Minister Conor Murphy announced a new economic policy for Northern Ireland based on four pillars. Productivity was one of these pillars, but it has probably had the least publicity since the announcement of this new policy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"beltel-ebe0ecc6_root beltel-ebe0ecc6_paragraph beltel-300db776_none beltel-91174671_primary beltel-1d70522a_marginbottom0 beltel-1d70522a_margintop0 beltel-b48c4984_inherit\" style=\"color:var(--color-primary-80)\">While this may be disappointing for economists, it isn\u2019t really that surprising to anyone else. Productivity isn\u2019t a concept that exactly gets a person\u2019s pulse racing and, in many cases, it has a very negative connotation. This arises because, when we have talked about productivity in the past, we have been focused on the wrong objective. This is a problem, because we are going to need to talk about productivity quite a lot over the next number of years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Labour productivity is an important economic indicator (Getty Images) When the Northern Ireland Executive was restored last year,&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":319171,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5011],"tags":[115904,30996,2000,1144,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-319170","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-northern-ireland","8":"tag-conor-murphy","9":"tag-department-for-the-economy","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-northern-ireland","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114974852718037267","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=319170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319170\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/319171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}