Short Notes: productivity

In general, productivity measures the effectiveness or efficiency of productive effort.  Productivity can be measured in many different ways.  Physical productivity measures the actual amount of a good or service produced (eg. tons of steel, or number of haircuts). 

Productivity can also be measured in terms of the value of output.  Most commonly, productivity is measured as the amount of output produced over a certain period of work (e g. output per hour); this is considered a measure of labour productivity.  But other approaches are also possible, including measurements of capital productivity (output relative to the value or physical quantity of invested capital) and “total factor productivity” (which is an abstract statistical measurement of the overall effectiveness of production).