One after the other, Britain’s recent prime ministers have pledged to revive the nation’s economy. One after the other, the promised growth eluded them.

Andy Burnham, set to formally become the newest prime minister on Monday after being named head of the Labour Party on Friday, has arrived with his own version of this pledge: “Good growth in every British postcode.”

His plan? Give away power to local officials so they can make their own economic choices. Mr. Burnham has promised to bring about “the biggest change in our lifetimes to the way the country is run.”

Mr. Burnham has not revealed the details of his economic agenda. But his priorities are emerging in his speeches and recommendations from advisers. The New York Times spoke with five economists and policy strategists who are playing a role in formulating Mr. Burnham’s economic vision, several of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk openly about policies that were still not final.

Alongside the so-called devolution of power, Mr. Burnham has said he will bring more public utilities and services under public control, while quickly tackling the high cost of living.

But Mr. Burnham will face the same economic challenges that befell his predecessors: a heavy public debt burden, stubbornly high inflation and low productivity growth. Those are compounded by the unavoidable legacies of the country’s decision a decade ago to leave the European Union, which has dragged on the economy, and years of too little public investment. Nervous consumers are saving a lot, rather than spending.

Mr. Burnham faces formidable economic problems, but at their heart is stalled growth.

Britain’s economy has been sluggish since the 2008 financial crisis. Gross domestic product per person is just 7 percent higher than it was in early 2008, compared with more than 20 percent in the decade before the crisis.

“Growth is the big challenge the U.K. faces,” said David Aikman, the director of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, an independent think tank. The country’s more enduring problems like how to fund the clean energy transition and support an aging population “would look a lot easier if we had faster growth,” he added.

Many of the big economic troubles, like high debt and huge demands on public spending, aren’t unique to Britain. But Mr. Burnham is bound by constraints of his — and his party’s — own making. Wary of spooking international buyers of British government debt and raising borrowing costs further, he has pledged to stick to strict rules on debt and spending made by Rachel Reeves, whom he is expected to replace as chancellor of the Exchequer in coming days. Mr. Burnham will also inherit a party that promises not to raise any of the three biggest taxes in the country, including income tax.

Mr. Burnham comes to the prime ministership after nearly a decade as the mayor of Greater Manchester in the north of England. The job gave him power over transport, housing, policing and skills development through adult education and training. Mr. Burnham highlighted the virtues of local over central government control as a political signature and has promised to further devolve powers from Westminster nationwide.

Britain is “extraordinarily centralized,” said Diane Coyle, a professor of public policy at the University of Cambridge who has influenced economic policymaking in Manchester for much of the past two decades.

Power, especially over finances, is hoarded in London, a level of centralization that is notable by international standards. Local governments have less ability to raise the funds they need than peer countries, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D.

Centralization has led to two big, deeply entrenched problems — low growth and lagging prosperity in most of the country, and economic overheating in London and the southeast characterized by unaffordable housing. London’s productivity is 30 percent higher than Britain’s average, and it has been that way for the past couple of decades.

Here, Manchester is instructive. The city, which was an industrial powerhouse in the 19th century, suffered through the second half of the last century amid rapid deindustrialization. But it is staging a revival. The city has become a growth model with impressive amounts of inward investment and productivity gains. Mr. Burnham’s hope is that Manchester’s resurgence, the seeds of which were laid before he became mayor, can be replicated across the country.

The critical advantage of devolution, Ms. Coyle said, is officials get better information about concerns like what skills local companies need in workers, and can better sync education and training policies to meet those demands.

The recommendation was echoed by the O.E.C.D., which said on Wednesday that if Britain could shrink the gaps in regional productivity it could raise overall economic growth. Local policies could be used to get more young people into jobs and improve transportation, both major culprits in Britain’s regional inequality.

Getting there will be hard. Britain is a patchwork of local authorities, with overlapping boundaries and varying responsibilities. Some control policing. Others the collection of waste. As power has become centralized in London, the capacity to manage economic policy effectively has drained away from many parts of the country.

Britain has been left both “too fragmented and too centralized,” said Neil Lee, a professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics. Now there is a broader political consensus to try to address this, he added.

The departing government had said it was working on a plan to give local officials more control over how they spend a share of national taxes. Those efforts are in the early stages, and it remains to be seen how Mr. Burnham will carry out his vision for devolution.

Several of his other proposals are also long-term in nature. Mr. Burnham has said he will lay out a 10-year plan to bring down the cost of water, housing, energy and transportation by taking “greater public control” of these utilities and services. Given the fiscal constraints he will face, that probably means stronger regulation and more partnerships between government and companies, not widespread nationalization.

Will any of this generate economic growth? Maybe, economists say, though not quickly.

In the short term, Mr. Burnham faces a citizenry impatient for change and is expected to announce steps to tackle the cost of living.

The new government will hopefully do “a few eye-catching measures to address the cost of living,” maybe on energy prices, rent or social housing, said Danny Sriskandarajah, the chief executive of the New Economics Foundation, a think tank that has been among those advising Mr. Burnham.

The last few years have shown how the plans of Britain’s political leaders can be sent off course. The British economy is highly sensitive to shocks from events overseas because of its openness to trade and dependence on foreign bondholders.

At the start of this year, quicker economic growth and a reduction in borrowing seemed in sight, and inflation was expected to finally return to the central bank’s 2 percent target. But then the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran set off a war that pushed up energy prices. Household energy bills have risen on average 13 percent from a couple of months ago. Expectations of interest rate cuts, which would lower mortgage costs, have vanished.

Mr. Burnham will have to fight through these shocks to deliver his own economic agenda, including an improvement in living standards.

Otherwise, disposable incomes, adjusted for inflation, will fall, Mr. Sriskandarajah said. “And no government is going to survive that.”

Economists and chief executives are divided over whether artificial intelligence is making American workers more productive yet.

Zoom out, though, and a quieter trend is hiding in the data. For years now, “labor productivity” — an economic measure of how much each worker produces — has been climbing at its fastest pace in at least two decades. Artificial intelligence is merely a fresh ingredient in the gumbo of forces propelling the trend, not the central one, at least for now. Tight labor markets, digitization and remote work are among other parts of the mix.

“I never thought I’d see this many years of really high productivity and, by the way, expect it to continue,” Jerome H. Powell told reporters in March, before he stepped down as Federal Reserve chair. “And we haven’t really started to see the effects of generative A.I.”

A potential win-win

In the best of times, productivity gains are a sign that workers are using new tools or updated methods to work more efficiently; smarter, not just harder. This can offer a win-win to workers, customers and business owners: If firms can produce more in the same or fewer work hours, then presumably they can increase revenue, reinvest in operations and pay workers more, all without sacrificing profitability — or relying on price increases to push profits higher.

Henry McVey, an investment chief at KKR, a private equity firm, said he was seeing exactly that across its portfolio — in health care, tech and retail. Restaurant chains are using cloud computing to manage inventory better. Remote work has helped companies hire from a bigger talent pool. Medical records have gone digital.

“I believe the productivity gains began coming out of Covid with the digitization of work, remote work and the implementation of machine learning — and we’re just scratching the surface on A.I.,” Mr. McVey said.

Another driver of sunnier productivity numbers has been low unemployment, which has stayed at or below 4.5 percent since October 2021 — the longest streak since the 1960s. When nearly everyone who wants a job has one, employers have to pay more to attract workers, which pushes them to find efficiencies elsewhere.

That can become self-reinforcing, said Chirag Lala of the Center for Public Enterprise, a nonprofit focused on economic development, especially if artificial intelligence starts paying off. “Once we get started on a trend with consumption, incomes or productivity, it’s like inertia,” he said. Breaking it takes a serious shock.

Staffing adjustments

Mr. McVey pointed to another, more solemn reason productivity is up: job cuts. There have been significant layoffs in finance and tech, two industries that generate an outsize share of corporate profits. Tech employment has shrunk for 18 consecutive months. Finance has lost more than 100,000 jobs since a peak in May 2025.

A Federal Reserve survey of businesses this spring noted that many companies said A.I.-driven efficiencies had allowed them to delay or skip hiring altogether. A separate index of corporate earnings calls, compiled by Bloomberg, reported a reduced appetite for hiring in nearly every industry.

In the Permian Basin in West Texas, the heart of America’s world-leading oil industry, companies are running leaner than ever, said Steve Pruett, chief executive of Elevation Resources. He credits industry consolidation, along with better drilling technology.

“We used to just drill two miles down and one mile out,” Mr. Pruett said. “As tech improved and we got better at it, we still drill two miles deep, but now we drill two miles out, the well produces more, there are better rates of return on those ‘longer laterals’ and better productivity per rig.”

Around the time Elevation was founded in 2013, the oil and gas industry employed about 200,000 people. By this summer that had fallen to roughly 115,000, even as profits and output per worker climbed.

The job loss is clearly bad news for the workers affected when companies become leaner. But economists generally view “doing more with less” as a plus for the economy overall.

For the “professional and business services” sector, tracked by the Labor Department, productivity growth has been at or above 3 percent annually since 2021. Employment in the sector has fallen since 2023, leading to a slew of discouraged job seekers — even as the health care, social assistance and education sectors have helped pick up the slack in overall job growth.

The economy’s continued better-than-expected growth, despite subdued immigration and waves of baby boomer retirements, is also a sign of the increased productivity among “prime-age” workers ages 25 to 54.

Reasons for caution

Not everyone is convinced of a rosy read on recent productivity data. Productivity numbers are notoriously noisy in the short run, skeptics note. And to the extent tech evangelists have attributed existing gains to artificial intelligence, some experts remain unconvinced. The Yale Budget Lab’s A.I. Labor Market Tracker, for instance, has found no clear link between A.I. adoption and employment changes.

“There are several possibilities here, and the productivity data in particular is really hard to interpret,” said Martha Gimbel, the Yale Budget Lab’s executive director.

Productivity is, most simply, output divided by work hours. But it is also measured by economists in “real” terms, meaning the “output” side of the equation is inflation-adjusted. So volatile spikes in inflation can drag down the headline productivity numbers, even when workers are no less efficient than before.

Last year’s tariffs and this year’s oil-price shock from the war with Iran both pushed inflation up, which may make productivity look weaker in the short run than it actually is. Still, oil prices have now fallen from the peaks during the war. If that holds, productivity data could look better later this year.

Who shares in the fruits?

Whether corporate efficiency gains will be shared with households is an open question. For years, pay has lagged productivity growth, diminishing laborers’ share of national income.

“If real compensation lags productivity growth, labor’s share falls,” said Jared Bernstein, who served as chair of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Council of Economic Advisers. Over the past decade, productivity growth has been double real compensation growth, according to Mr. Bernstein’s analysis.

An axiom in economics is that, at first, productivity shows up “everywhere except the productivity statistics,” as the Nobel laureate Robert Solow put it. It wasn’t until the 2000s, after all, that the productive effects of the internet and personal computing boom of the 1990s showed up.

Mike Skordeles, the head of U.S. Economics at Truist, a bank based in Charlotte, N.C., said he was already producing more research than previously — a result of improved tools for data analysis and modeling.

Only a few years ago, he said, “I would have had or hired three lower-level junior economists doing some of the charting and stuff that I can now do with the click of a button.”