The Productivity Imperative

Ask business leaders what President-elect Donald Trump’s top economic priority should be, and you’ll get an array of predictable answers: Cut business taxes. Reduce the debt. Reform trade deals. Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric Co., has a different response. “We have to find ways to raise productivity,” Immelt told an audience at a September conference in New York. Otherwise, he warned, America could face years of below-trend growth with all the associated problems: rising debt, falling living standards, and so on. Conversely, GE economists estimate that if the world boosted industrial productivity by just 1 percent, it could add $15 trillion—yes, trillion—to the global gross domestic