[originaltext] Host: At Friday’s annual meeting of the American Economic Asso

Host: At Friday’s annual meeting of the American Economic Association in Washington, a panel of prominent economists examined the business outlook and concluded that U.S. productivity growth will slow and that the economy itself is unlikely to regain the fast growth rates of the 1990s.
   Harvard University professor Dale Jorgenson said, with the collapse of the high-tech bubble in the stock market, the U.S. economy is reverting to the slower growth rates of the period 1973 to 1995. In the boom years from 1995 to 2000, the U.S. economy grew by about five percent annually. That high growth. said Professor Jorgenson, was fueled by enormous gains in productivity that are unlikely to return.
   Voice: So, 2.78 is the figure going forward for about the next decade. In other words, we’re not going to have an acceleration of economic growth, contrary to what Alan Greenspan (central bank governor) may say in his testimony to the Senate Banking Committee only two weeks from today. That’s not going to happen. It is something that it is just totally outside the range of possibilities, even under the most optimistic assumption about productivity and capital deepening.