Total Factor Productivity

Total factor productivity (TFP), also called multifactor productivity, measures how much output an economic unit produces from a given bundle of all its inputs taken together — capital, labour, and often intermediate materials. It is the efficiency with which inputs are jointly transformed into output, and it captures everything that raises output without raising measured inputs: technology, organization, and the reallocation of resources. TFP is measured in two broad ways: the index-number approach, which forms the ratio of an aggregate output index to an aggregate input index using economically justified (superlative) weights, and the econometric production-function approach, which estimates the technology and recovers productivity as an unobserved term.