Third, the fall in productivity growth is co-existing with a slew of new technological developments such as cloud computing, big data analytics, robotics, fintech and the digital revolution to name a few. Once again, the Solow paradox of the 1970s and 1980s – “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics” 12 – seems to have come alive.
Some proximate hypotheses compete for explanatory power in unravelling the productivity puzzle. First, there is the ‘mismeasurement’ view which would seek further refinements in the manner in which factor inputs and their quality are measured so as to yield ‘uncontaminated’ estimates of TFP 13.