Since 2004 – that is, before the crisis – average productivity growth among the 99%-ers has averaged only 1%. This suggests that, among a significant swathe of UK companies, levels of productivity must have flat-lined or fallen. This lower tail of companies shares one important feature with the upper tail: neither is confined to particular regions or sectors. Near-zero rates of productivity growth among the 99%-ers are a feature of all regions and almost all sectors (Table 1). Even the best-performing region (London) and best-performing sector (professional, scientific and technical) in the lower tail has mustered productivity growth of only 2% and 4%. 11  Cornell University, INSEAD and WIPO (2017). Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (2017). 13 Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (2017). 14 These numbers control for differences in the sectoral composition and sizes of firms between the countries in question. Further detail of the method used here is set out below Chart 7 in the annex. 12  5  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  5  We can look more precisely at the fraction of firms who have seen effectively no rise in productivity since before the crisis. 15  For the UK as a whole, that amounts to around half of them. For some regions and st  sectors, the fraction of firms that have stood still in the 21 century is closer to two-thirds. This tail of seriallystagnating companies is long indeed.
In practice, it would appear that such responsiveness has not increased over the last decade, while empirical evidence supporting a growing role of global measures of economic slack in the inflation process of the euro area and other advanced economies has been limited. On balance, not only is the net effect of globalisation on euro area prices difficult to accurately gauge, but it may also be changing through time. For this reason, the ECB continues to actively monitor possible ongoing changes in the inflation process. At the same time, efficient adjustment can be best facilitated by focusing on price stability and continuing to solidly anchor inflation expectations in the face of considerable relative price shocks. Developments in the real estate sector Let me conclude with some remarks on residential property prices. As with other asset prices, residential property prices are closely monitored by the ECB in terms of our economic analysis. Within this context, while we take the euro area real estate sector into account in assessing risks to price stability, we certainly do not target house prices, or for that matter, any other asset prices. We do monitor asset prices closely because of the potentially high costs for price stability and for the economy as a whole that are associated with strong appreciations and rapid reversals in asset prices. Also, our monetary analysis covers the monitoring of money and credit which often reflect the evolution of prices and house purchases.