how is “productivity” measured?

Question

I was listening to some political pundit banging on about increasing productivity across different industries.

And something like a factory, I can see it: the more widgets you make, the more productive you are. Or how many sales you make in a call centre or on the retail floor. But how are you measuring the productivity of, say, a therapist, or a bus driver, or a teacher?

In: 7

Answer 1

Generally, your gut is correct: productivity is the measure of output over time. More output over the same time is higher productivity.

But industries without a hard output wouldn’t be measured the same way. There isn’t a concrete way to measure the productivity of teachers, though they could try to measure *efficiency* and extrapolate productivity from that (higher efficiency is “same output over less time” which is theoretically more productive).