Environmentally adjusted multifactor productivity: Accounting for renewable natural resources and ecosystem services

Multifactor productivity is a comprehensive measure of productivity where the underlying production function accounts for multiple factor inputs, traditionally labour and produced capital. While single-factor productivity is intuitively simple, such measure offers a biased picture of the economy because it attributes all variation in output growth to a single factor input (e.g. consumption of fossil fuels or material resources) while the role of other factors is ignored. Multifactor productivity aims at addressing this shortcoming, and as such it is a valuable component of the OECD set of Green Growth headline indicators. This paper presents further progress in measuring the EAMFP and related growth accounting indicators in 52 countries for 1996-2018. An important novelty is the inclusion of renewable natural resources such as land, timber and fisheries, and ecosystem services such as coastal and watershed protection. Exploratory results on accounting for renewable energy resources are also included.