For Chris Dillow and other advocates of employee ownership, the last few days have been heady indeed. On Saturday it was revealed that the boards of the UK's two biggest co-operatives have agreed the terms of a merger that would form the world's largest consumer co-operative group, with a combin...

All economists know productivity matters. But they also know it isn't easy to measure, nor to explain the often large and persistent productivity gaps between nations. A new paper by Harvard's Ian Dew-Becker and Northwestern University's Robert J. Gordon makes a provocative contribution to the p...