How much must be invested in new technologies and spent on R&D to stabilise productivity gains?

One very likely explanation for the decline in productivity gains is that it takes more and more investment in new technologies and R&D spending to achieve the same increase in labour productivity. The effectiveness of investment in new technologies and R&D has therefore declined over time. Comparing OECD countries, we look at what increase in investment in new technologies and R&D spending would have been needed to prevent productivity gains from falling since 2002, in all OECD countries, the United Kingdom, the euro zone, the United States and Japan. We see that investment in new technologies would have had to increase by between 1.2 and 2.6 percentage points of GDP, or R&D spending by between 1 and 2.2 percentage points of GDP, in order to avoid the decline in productivity gains between the 2002-2007 and 2012-2023 periods .