One of the innocent pleasures of attending the Davos World Economic Forum, when I was invited, was to hear its founder and former chairman, Klaus Schwab, introducing the political bigwigs speaking at the event. With an effusiveness that was off the scale, even the dodgy and mediocre were elevated to the status of world statesmen and women with honeyed praise. I would love to have heard him do Sir Keir Starmer.

Schwab no longer runs the WEF, so the task of introducing Donald Trump will fall to somebody else. I do not suppose he will be welcomed to the stage as the petulant man-child whose tariff madness is hurting businesses all over the world, including in America, even though that is what many in the audience will think. It does not come easy to say I feel sorry for Fifa, but they must be disappointed that their inaugural peace prize, awarded to the president, has not stopped the madness.

You could almost think that having failed to wreck the global economy with his tariffs in 2025, the man some call Agent Orange is back for another go this year.

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Anyway, others have written on this, so today I wanted to focus on something else, alerted to it by my Sunday Times colleague Irwin Stelzer. This is the fact that, despite or perhaps because of the president, something in the US economy is going very well. The fact that it is calls to mind a comment I heard by JK Galbraith, the Canadian economist and chronicler of the Great Crash, decades ago. He said it takes longer for unhinged policies to ruin an economy than you might think.

Anyway, what is happening is a stonking US productivity revival. Official figures from America’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show that in the third quarter of last year, US productivity grew at an annualised rate of 4.9 per cent, a product of a 5.4 per cent increase in output, gross domestic product, and a much smaller 0.5 per cent rise in hours worked.

The increase as we would measure it, the latest quarter compared with a year earlier, was not quite so stellar, 1.9 per cent, but was in line with long-run trends, which are a lot better than our recent ones.

Productivity in America is growing very strongly because, while Trump’s tariffs have killed off employment growth — non-farm payroll numbers have been flatlining since the “liberation day” tariff unveiling in April last year — they have not yet got in the way of economic growth.

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There was another story in the latest figures, which could have been designed to make us in the UK green with envy. “During the current business cycle, starting in the fourth quarter of 2019, labour productivity has grown at an annualised rate of 2 per cent,” the BLS said, “reflecting a 2.6 per cent rate of growth in output and a 0.6 per cent rate of growth in hours worked.

“The 2 per cent annualised rate of non-farm business productivity growth in the current business cycle thus far is higher than the 1.5 per cent rate of the previous business cycle, from the fourth quarter of 2007 through the fourth quarter of 2019, and is just below the long-term rate of 2.1 per cent since the first quarter of 1947.”

You have read that correctly. America did suffer a modest productivity slowdown in the wake of the global financial crisis but nothing like as severe as that in the UK, and now productivity growth has pretty much got back to its long-run norm.

In contrast, UK productivity is still suffering, hence the productivity downgrade by the Office for Budget Responsibility for the November 26 budget last year, which Rachel Reeves responded to with tax increases. Whether that will further damage productivity is for another day.

Though UK productivity also grew by an average of roughly 2 per cent a year before the global financial crisis, its average growth rate from late 2007 to late 2019 was just 0.3 per cent, while since late 2019 it has been 0.4 per cent. In each case, UK productivity growth has been just a fifth of that of America.

It reminds me of the scene in When Harry Met Sally, filmed in Katz’s Delicatessen in New York, when an actress (the late director Rob Reiner’s mother) says of Meg Ryan’s character: “I’ll have what she’s having!” We would like some of what America is having.

What America has had, first and foremost, is growth, particularly in recent years. US GDP in the third quarter of last year was 14.5 per cent up on the fourth quarter of 2019. That was nearly three times as fast as the 5.2 per cent recorded for the UK, weighed down by the pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Brexit. Over the period from late 2007 to the eve of the pandemic, US growth was a cumulative 24 per cent, nearly 10 percentage points above the UK’s 14.7 per cent.

America has inbuilt productivity advantages, including a more dynamic and entrepreneurial economy and technology leadership, with its big tech firms driving forward productivity improvements. It has a large home market, which generates economies of scale, which the UK decided it did not need a decade ago in deciding to leave the EU single market.

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Is there any hope? I don’t want to be too gloomy in a week that started with Blue Monday, said by some to be the most depressing day of the year.

Britain may be becoming more like America in employment growth, which the latest figures show is at best flatlining. Flat employment alongside modest GDP growth mechanically produces a rise in productivity.

Where America leads Britain follows may also be happening in another respect. Some of the US productivity revival is likely to be due to artificial intelligence. AI-driven productivity growth is the hope for us too. It cannot come too soon.

David Smith is Economics Editor of The Sunday Times