We introduce two labour productivity indexes. Both indexes are intended to capture the shift in the short-run production frontier, which can be attributed to technological progress or growth in capital inputs. The two indexes adopt distinct approaches to measuring the distance between the production frontiers. One is based on the distance function and the other is based on the profit function. In the end, we show that these two theoretical measures coincide with the index number formulae that are computable from the observable prices and quantities of output and input. By applying these formulae to the U.S. industry data of the years 1970–2005, we compare newly proposed labour productivity indexes with the average labour productivity growth over periods and across industries. We revisit the hypothesis of Baumol’s disease throughout our observations on the trend of industry labour productivities in the service sector.

我们介绍了两个劳动生产率指数。两项指标均旨在捕捉短期生产前沿的变化，这可以归因于技术进步或资本投入的增长。这两个指数采用不同的方法来衡量生产边界之间的距离。一个基于距离函数，另一个基于利润函数。最后，我们表明这两种理论方法与可从可观察到的价格和产出与投入量计算出的指数数公式相吻合。通过将这些公式应用于1970-2005年的美国行业数据，我们将新提议的劳动生产率指数与各个时期以及各个行业的平均劳动生产率增长进行了比较。