The slowdown of productivity growth in the industrialised western nations is now very well trodden ground. Some have focused on one or other particular explanation, and can point to the very sudden turndown around I973 as a rationale for this. At the other extreme there have been attempts, most notably by Denison, and generally via a growth-accounting framework, to identify comprehensively a vast range of possible factors with, as we know, still worrying residuals. Worse still, where they were large and positive they are now small or negative, raising doubts that they could have registered unquantified advances in knowledge and leaving the slowdown more of a puzzle than ever. The problem is not of course that economists cannot provide explanations for the slowdown. Quite the reverse is true in fact. There is a long list of candidates; but for numerous reasons it is proving very difficult to find agreement on the main culprits or to identify their contribution to the overall slowdown. These include problems of measurement-of outputs and inputs, of quality changes, of non-marketed items, etc. of unobservables the state of knowledge and technology, the attitudes of management and work-force of methodology in particular, queries about the growth-accounting framework and perhaps above all interrelations and multiple causalities between capital, labour and output, between real and financial variables, between supply and demand factors. Assar Lindbeck's paper, which I much welcome as a further step towards unravelling this central problem, adopts a broad and ambitious target. It is partly, though not entirely, in the growth-accounting mould, and presents a reasonably exhaustive quantitative breakdown of the causes of the slowdown. At the risk of great injustice to the author, both in sweeping over many elements of the discussion surrounding the empirical estimates, and of pinning on him a precision which he would be the first to abjure, the relative magnitude of the effects which he estimates can be summarised as follows: