Effects of Public Infrastructure on Cost Structure and Productivity in the Private Sector

This paper examines the effects of public infrastructure on the cost structure and productivity in the private sector in Australia. Translog cost functions incorporating public capital infrastructure are estimated for the aggregate private sector as well as for seven broad industry groups using annual time series data for 1968/69–1995/96. The effects of public infrastructure on productivity are measured in terms of both cost-saving and output-augmenting measures. The empirical results suggest that public infrastructure has a positive and significant impact on productivity in private sector industries. Public capital serves as a substitute for both private capital and labour. The rates of return to public capital are significant and vary over the sample period.     

An empirical study on public capital spillovers from the USA to Canada

The effect of public capital on private sector productivity has received much attention in the literature. The impact of an adjacent country's public capital on domestic productivity has, however, not been previously examined. This paper attempts to fill this gap by examining the possibility of such spillovers from the USA to Canada. Due to close proximity of both countries, the hypothesis of the paper is that these spillovers are important. A production function model introduces US public capital as an exogenous variable and tests for its significance. The results indicate positive spillovers from the USA public capital to Canadian productivity.     

Is Public Capital Productive in China? Evidence from a Panel of Chinese Provinces

In addition to the direct productivity effect, public capital also has an indirect effect on private capital stock and labor input. This paper offers an evaluation of both the direct and indirect effects of Chinese public capital by applying a trans-log aggregate production function including public capital stock to a panel of regional data from 1986–2009. Moreover, we calculate the impact of public capital on regional total factor productivity (TFP) performance by introducing a system GMM estimation. The results show that the output elasticity of Chinese public capital stock is significantly positive, but decreasing year on year, and public capital is found to be a substitute for labor but complementary to private capital input. Finally, public capital has a significant positive effect on regional TFP performance.     

DO STOCK MARKETS VALUE EFFICIENCY?

An empirical model determining the relationship between changes in firm-level productivity and changes in firm value is estimated using an unbalanced panel of 706 public limited companies observed over the period 1996–2002. We find a positive relationship between efficiency and the market value of manufacturing sector firms controlling for traditional accounting measures of performance such as earnings per share and the return on capital employed. This evidence is consistent with the stock market valuing the adoption of better management practices that lead to better resource utilisation. By contrast, we find no such evidence for service sector firms.     

Regional productivity variation and the impact of public capital stock: an analysis with spatial interaction,with reference to Spain

In this article, we examine whether variations in the level of public capital across Spain's Provinces affected productivity levels over the period 1996 to 2005. The analysis is motivated by contemporary urban economics theory, involving a production function for the competitive sector of the economy (‘industry’) which includes the level of composite services derived from ‘service’ firms under monopolistic competition. The outcome is potentially increasing returns to scale resulting from pecuniary externalities deriving from internal increasing returns in the monopolistic competition sector. We extend the production function by also making (log) labour efficiency a function of (log) total public capital stock and (log) human capital stock, leading to a simple and empirically tractable reduced form linking productivity level to density of employment, human capital and public capital stock. The model is further extended to include technological externalities or spillovers across provinces. Using panel data methodology, we find significant elasticities for total capital stock and for human capital stock, and a significant impact for employment density. The finding that the effect of public capital is significantly different from zero, indicating that it has a direct effect even after controlling for employment density, is contrary to some of the earlier research findings which leave the question of the impact of public capital unresolved.     

Assessing the contribution of public capital to private production: Evidence from the German manufacturing sector

Using time-series cross-section data from the manufacturing sector of the 11 West German 'Bundesländer' (Federal States) from 1970 to 1996, I examine the impact of public capital on private production. My econometric analysis explicitly takes into account four of the most frequent specification issues in the context of time-series crosssection data analysis: serial correlation, groupwise heteroscedasticity, cross-sectional correlation and non-stationarity of data. For all approaches and tested specifications, I find that public capital is a significant input for production in the manufacturing sector. Moreover, I find that differences in public capital endowment can explain long-term differences in productivity across the Bundesländer. One tentative conclusion that can be drawn from this finding is that differences in public capital endowment might also explain a part of the still-existing productivity gap between manufacturing in East and West Germany. However, I emphasise that the existence of positive effects of public capital on private production is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for concluding that public investments should be boosted in the future.     

Does federally financed business R&D matter for US productivity growth?

This paper investigates the impact of federally financed business R&D on productivity of the US nonfarm business sector. Results of a cointegration analysis suggest that a long run relation between productivity and total (privately and federally financed) R&D capital stock exists. Moreover, the estimation results do not confirm the finding of previous empirical studies that the productivity effects of federally financed business R&D are lower compared with those of privately financed business R&D.     

Infrastructure investment and Canadian manufacturing productivity

This paper examines the relationship between Canadian public infrastructure and private output using a Constant Elasticity and Substitution-Translog (CES-TL) cost model to describe the interaction of the public and private sectors.

We find public capital a substitute for private capital within the Canadian manufacturing sector. Additionally, the services of public capital enhance the productivity of private capital. Canadian manufacturing costs are characterized by economies of scale, indicating that less than optimal plant sizes dominated Canadian manufacturing sector during the study period. Advances in disembodied technical progress are also indicated.     

Public and private capital productivity in Russia: a non-parametric investigation

The productivity of public capital has been very popular research topic for US and other OECD countries, while studies using data from transitional countries are almost non-existent. In this paper, we analyze the productivity of public and private capital in Russia with parametric and non-parametric regression methods utilizing a unique regional level panel data from 2003 to 2007. More specifically, we assess public capital’s spillover effects, i.e., the productivity of public capital on private output, as well as the productivity of different capital ownership types on total output. We find that public capital has a clear positive effect on private output. However, our estimates and test statistics show that parametric methods are not able to grasp vast non-linearities and heterogeneity present among Russian regions, while the non-parametric approach can capture these important features of the data better. Furthermore, we find that multicollinearity is an important methodological problem which should be accounted for in analysis concerning capital data. Our results also suggest that the impact of public capital in Russia is heterogeneous in the sense that for some regions its contribution to private output is insignificant or even negative while it has a considerable positive role for most regions. Concerning the capital elasticities of total output, we find that public capital is less productive than private capital and roughly as productive as joint private-public capital.     

Labour market effects of public capital stock: evidence for the Spanish private sector

This paper provides a new rationale for the positive effect of public capital stock on employment and wages. We show that higher levels of public capital reduce wages along the wage equation and enhance employment due to the resulting larger elasticity of labour demand with respect to wages. The estimation of a structural model for the Spanish private sector reveals that this wage channel is empirically relevant. We use the estimated parameters to simulate the recent incidence of the ratio of public to private capital stock on the private sector economic performance. We find (i) sizeable effects on employment, capital stock and gross domestic product, and (ii) that the wage channel is particularly important for employment.     

Environmental efficiency and labour productivity: Trade-off or joint dynamics? A theoretical investigation and empirical evidence from Italy using NAMEA

In this paper we test an adapted EKC hypothesis to verify the relationship between ‘environmental efficiency’ (namely emissions per unit of value added) and labour productivity (value added per employee). We exploit NAMEA data on Italy for 29 sector branches and 6 categories of air emissions for the period 1991-2001. We employ data on capital stock and trade openness to test the robustness of our results.On the basis of the theoretical and empirical analyses focusing on innovation, firm performances and environmental externalities, we would expect a positive correlation between environmental efficiency and labour productivity — a negative correlation between the emissions intensity of value added and labour productivity — which departs from the conventional mainstream view. The hypothesis tested is a critical one within the longstanding debate on the potential trade-off or complementarity between environmental preservation and economic performance, which is strictly associated with the role of technological innovation. We find that for most air emission categories there is a positive relationship between labour productivity and environmental efficiency. Labour productivity dynamics, then, seem to be complementary to a decreasing emissions intensity in the production process. Taking a disaggregate sector perspective, we show that the macro-aggregate evidence is driven by sector dynamics in a non-homogenous way across pollutants. Services tend always to show a ‘complementary’ relationship, while industry seems to be associated with inverted U-shape dynamics for greenhouse gases and nitrogen oxides. This is in line with our expectations. In any case, EKC shapes appear to drive such productivity links towards complementarity. The extent to which this evidence derives from endogenous market forces, industrial and structural change, and policy effects is discussed by taking an evolutionary perspective to innovation and by referring to impure public goods arguments.     

Evidence of public capital spillovers and endogenous growth in Taiwan

This study reaffirms the empirical evidence of public capital spillovers and endogenous growth by using data for the period 1966Q3–2012Q3 in Taiwan. Avoiding the use of a 100% depreciation rate for generating public and private capital stock series that is applied in some related studies, this study estimates these series by using disaggregate data of various investment assets and applying their individual depreciation rates, as calculated by Jorgenson and Stiroh (2000). The results show that, first, (per capita) output, private capital stock, and public capital stock cointegrated in the sample period. Second, the contribution of private capital to output is 50% higher than that of public capital. Third, in the presence of significant and sizeable public capital spillover effects, growth in Taiwan is strictly endogenous. Finally, the dynamic model with a cointegration equation helps in studying some sensible short-run properties of the model and bi-directional effects among variables.     

我国省级公共资本经济效应分析——基于面板VAR模型的实证分析

在现有文献研究的基础上,利用1999—2010年我国29个省(自治区、直辖市)的面板数据,基于内生增长理论构建计量经济模型,检验了公共资本存量、私人资本存量与经济增长之间的面板Granger因果关系。构建面板VAR模型度量公共资本存量对经济的冲击。结果表明:公共资本存量的冲击对人均私人资本存量和人均GDP都产生正向影响,但长期看该影响不具有持续效应。     

The Tyranny of Concepts: CUDIE (Cumulated, Depreciated, Investment Effort) Is Not Capital

The cost of public investment is not the increment to the value ofpublic capital. Unlike with private investors, there is no plausiblebehavioral model in which every dollar that the public sectorspends as ``investment' creates economically valuable ``capital.'While this simple analytic point is obvious, it has so far beenuniformly ignored in the empirical literature on economic growth,which uses—at best—cumulated, depreciated, investmenteffort (CUDIE) as a proxy for capital stocks. However, particularlyfor developing countries the difference between investment costand capital value is of first-order empirical importance: governmentinvestment is half of more of total investment, and calculationspresented here suggest that in many countries government investmentspending has created little useful capital. This has implicationsin three broad areas. First, none of the existing empirical estimatesof the impact of public spending has identified the productivityof public capital. Even where public capital has a potentiallylarge contribution to production, public-investment spendingmay have had a low impact. Second, it implies that all estimatesof total factor productivity in developing countries are deeplysuspect as there is no way to empirically distinguish betweenlow growth because of investments that create no factors andlow growth due to slow productivity growth. Third, multivariateregressions to date have not adequately controlled for capitalstock growth, which leads to erroneous interpretations of regressioncoefficients.     

A multivariate time series analysis of the United States aggregate production function

This study examines the effects of hours of work per unit of private sector capital, the relative price of energy, government capital per unit of private sector capital, and inflation on private sector output per unit of capital in the U.S. over the period 1952–90. A small vector autoregressive model that comprises the variables typically employed in single-equation estimates of the aggregate production function is used. Variance decompositions and cumulative impulse response functions indicate that hours of work per unit of private sector capital, the relative price of energy, and the inflation rate have significant effects on private sector output per unit of capital over the 1952–90 period. However, there is no evidence of a significant effect for government capital per unit of private capital. An historical decomposition that begins in 1973 with the emergence of a “productivity slump” and continues through 1990 indicates that shocks to hours of work per unit of capital, the relative price of oil, and inflation appear important in explaining output per unit of capital but shocks to government capital are not important.     

R&D,public innovation policy,and productivity: The case of danish manufacturing

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between private R&D, public innovation support transferred to the private sector, and productivity in Danish manufacturing. Two main conclusions are established. First, public innovation support has a positive and significant effect on private R&D expenditures with an estimated elasticity of 0.062. Second, the indirect effect on productivity from public innovation support is reflected in a positive point estimate which is found to be robust to different specifications of R&D capital.     

Privatization and economic growth in Australia: the shorthand of a long process

The impact of privatization on economic growth has been little investigated relative to disaggregated approaches. A growth accounting framework is used here to investigate the impact of privatization on growth for the Australian economy. The contribution of public capital to the private sector and whether the growth process is endogenous or Solow is evaluated. Separate measures of public and private capital are computed in order to estimate their impacts with labour on Australian gross domestic product (GDP) growth for the period 1960 to 2003. A simple growth rates version is found preferred by stationarity and other tests. Labour growth appears to strongly positively influence the growth of GDP. In contrast, public capital growth has no statistically significant effect on GDP growth, or on private capital productivity. The data are consistent with the hypothesis that the coefficients of the growth equation are the same before and during privatization.     

COSTLY INTERMEDIATION AND THE POVERTY OF NATIONS*

This article has two goals: (i) to reduce the 7‐fold productivity differential required to explain the observed 33‐fold income difference between the richest and poorest countries of the world; and (ii) to explain cross‐country differences in the capital‐output ratio. To achieve the first goal we modify the production function of the standard neoclassical growth model to include public capital whose provision is subject to intermediation costs. For the second goal we distort private investment by introducing credit frictions. The model, quantified using cross‐country data, generates an income gap of 33 with productivity differences of only 3 under the measured variations in public and private capital. The required productivity gap declines even further, to 2.1, when we introduce a home‐production sector. On the second goal, however, credit frictions do a poor job of explaining cross‐country variations in the capital‐output ratio.