OECD published The Future of Productivity book. "Productivity diffusion is especially challenging in the services sector, partly due to low competitive pressures which blunt the incentives to adopt best practices. This partly reflects policy weaknesses and productivity problems in the services sector will become increasingly costly for two reasons. First, the weight of services in our economies will continue to rise. Second, it may hinder the effective functioning of global value chains since logistics, finance and communication are the oil that greases the wheels of globalisation." Also, the report states that "even though the most advanced firms can have productivity levels close to the global frontier, their aggregate impact is muted to the extent that they are under-sized."

The article is based on the results of the recently published report An International Comparison of the Quality of Academic Publication Output in the Czech Republic by the IDEA institute at CERGE-EI. Unlike most similar international bibliometric comparisons, ours does not only indicate the overall quantity of research publications noted in the Web of Science database, but also the quality of these publications. This enables us to compare Czech research fields both in terms of overall output and in terms of excellent output. We are also able to show how the international standing of Czech research fields has changed over time, the authors say.