It is obvious that it´s still too early to assess properly the impact of this labour market reform, and any such evaluation will have to consider multiple issues, including employment, labour turnover, human capital accumulation, among others. In the meantime, learning from the experience in other countries about the impact of similar regulatory changes on temporary employment could prove to be useful for the design of a rigorous evaluation of this reform in the case of Spain. These issues are covered in the first session. Second, another major challenge for the Spanish economy is the dismal performance of aggregate productivity, the ultimate and most important engine of economic growth and prosperity. Average annual total factor productivity growth over the 2000-2019 period was 0.2% in Spain, as against 0.5% in the euro area (and 0.9% in the United States). Among the various determinants of this gap, recent literature has been highlighting the role of the misallocation of resources across firms and the small size of businesses, which has a bearing on the country’s low aggregate productivity. In particular, 35.7% of total employment is in firms with less than 10 employees, compared with 28.5% in the European Union. To tackle this challenge, it is essential to explore the various reasons why our business sector is so skewed towards small, low-productivity firms and to mitigate the effects.
A study of Swedish data shows that such changes have raised productivity growth by 0.2 percentage points a year during the second half of the 1990s. 6  2  ITPS (2007). 3  Conway, Nicoletti, de Rosa and Steiner (2006). 4  See, for instance, Crépon, Duguet and Mairesse (1998). 5  Esser, Villalba and Tarantola (2007). 6  Forsling & Lindström (2004). BIS Review 12/2008  3  Organisation important for productivity growth IT is available all around the world at roughly the same price, but the differences are substantial with regard to how different countries and sectors use this technology to make their production more efficient (see Figure 5). The United States and Europe have experienced a similar productivity growth in the IT-producing sectors, but the Americans have had stronger growth in sectors with intensive use of IT. This includes, for instance, the wholesale and retail trade sectors and financial services. Studies indicate that one of the explanations for the United States’ relative productivity advantage over Europe is that the US companies have been quicker and better at adapting their organisations to the new technology. 7 One factor that might contribute to this difference is that the stricter regulations in the labour market in Europe mean that it takes longer time and costs more money to reorganise. Sweden is an exception in this context. We have seen a strong growth in productivity in the sectors using IT at the same time as we have a relatively regulated labour market.