Sliding Scales and Wage Flexibility in 1920s Britain

This note uses a cross-section of industry-level wage and unemployment rate information for early 1920s Britain to demonstrate that, in general, sliding scales had little impact on wage settlements. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that industries which had an above-average unemployment rate in the early 1920s experienced a disproportionate fall in nominal wages. There are also compositional effects in the sample which suggest that industries which had a predominantly male workforce, or were highly exposed to international competition in product markets, saw above-average rates of wage deflation.     

二十年代广东国民政府对教会学校的“收回”——以广州私立培正中学为例的研究

本文选取的二十世纪二十年代是近代中国民族运动蓬勃发展的时期,经过非基督教运动和收回教育权运动,教会学校的管理权转移到了中国政府手中.本文通过对广州一所由中国教徒创办、后由中国教会管理的教会中学--私立培正中学的研究,展现二十年代教会学校的性质变化过程.     

中国风景园林学的发端(1920s—1940s)

20世纪上半叶,西学东渐的发展给中国传统造园体系带来了极大的冲击和深远的影响。园艺学、建筑学和林学等相关专业学者在这样新旧交替的变局中开始研究中国现代风景园林课程与教育,并积极投身于风景园林实践中,为风景园林学的孕育与发展作出了不可磨灭的贡献。一大批留学归国的学者接触到先进的风景园林专业知识与教育,将国外的风景园林教育思想与中国传统的造园理念相融合,出现了一批早期的风景园林专业课程,推动了20世纪初中国风景园林学的发端。     

The elasticity of substitution in India's manufacturing sector

Using cross-section data and the translog cost function this paper examines the substitution possibilities between capital and materials and labor and materials since raw materials might be used to overcome the bottlenecks caused by shortages of physical capital and skilled labor. Three significant conclusions are: (a) Since materials are substitutable for both capital and labor to a considerable extent, capital and skilled labor may not be a binding constraint on growth. Agricultural materials expansion may substitute for these inputs and lead to expansion in the industrial sector. (b) Fixed proportion models are not warranted in India without modification, and (c) separability tests showed that materials must be included in the production function.     

The structure of production in South Korea's manufacturing sector

This paper estimates a model of producer behavior for South Korean manufacturing that simultaneously identifies substitution elasticities and scale economies. A non-homothetic translog function is employed which takes on various other functional forms (i.e., Cobb–Douglas, Homothetic, Homogeneous) as special or limiting cases. Four significant conclusions are: (a) there is potential scale economies in each subsector of South Korean manufacturing, (b) the substitutabilities between factor inputs are relatively low, (c) factor demands are price elastic, (d) the scale economies are correlated with the factor intensity.     

The Boom and the Slump: a Causal Account of the 1990s/2000s and the 1920s/1930s

Not all booms are alike, nor are slumps. The institutions and the shocks are never exactly the same. Yet the late 1990s boom, and its unwinding, strikingly parallel the boom of the roaring 1920s, the deep decline into the early 1930s andonly a partial rebound. Both experiences began with an investment boom, then a downturn in investment while consumption held up. Economic activity closely tracked investment. The realizations of extraordinary productivity gains were present in the problematic and incomplete recovery of the 1930s, which suggests the possibility that return to the medium‐term natural rate of unemployment may be a rather long process. I expect the rest of the decade to resemble the rest of the 1930s – a limited recovery with investment and employment below historical norms.     

The impact of world manufacturing growth on Australia's trading position

Michal Kalecki's pricing analysis is found to provide a fruitful basis for an examination of the impact of world business cycles on Australia's international trade. Australia's terms of trade are found to move procyclically with world manufacturing production as implied by application of the analysis. Implications of the change in the terms of trade for domestic producers and consumers are developed by adapting Kalecki's analysis to an open economy context. Fluctuations in world manufacturing are found to have a negligible impact on Australia's export volume and a strong positive impact on her import volume as expected based on application of the adapted analysis.     

Explaining aggregate investment in Britain: The importance of Tobin's Q

This note reports on work done in testing Tobin's ‘Q’ theory of investment on British data. Investment by industrial and commercial companies over 1960–1977 was studied. Q was found to be both significant and important, outperforming other plausible variables.     

Nowcasting sales growth of manufacturing companies in India

The performance of private corporate sector is used as an important demand indicator for monetary policy making. As these data are received with a lag, assessing and monitoring of corporate sales on a real-time basis poses a significant challenge to policy makers in India. In this context, this article attempts to nowcast quarterly sales growth of Indian manufacturing companies and GDP growth of India using dynamic factor modelling framework. A multiple-level framework through turning point analysis and elastic net structure is used to overcome the overfitting problem during variable selection. Empirical results show improvement in forecast accuracy for one quarter ahead nowcast using 3-factor and 4-factor models over the benchmark model. However, absolute dominance of 3-factor models over 4-factor models was not established. As such, the article has proposed a forecast combination technique to nowcast sales growth of manufacturing companies in India.     

Productivity growth patterns in US dairy products manufacturing plants

We analyse the productivity growth patterns in the US dairy products industry using the Census Bureau's plant-level data set. We decompose Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth into the scale and technical change components and analyse variability of plants’ productivity by constructing transition matrices. We observe a cross-sectional dispersion in plant-level productivity growth in the industry. Even though the industry aggregate shows a small TFP growth rate ?0.3%, quartile rank analysis shows that while the lowest productivity quartile plants average 1.9% loss in productivity, the highest productivity quartile plants average 1.1% growth annually. Our results show considerable movements of plants in their productivity rank categories overall and across age groups, and we find that the scale effect contribution to TFP growth accounts for about 90% of TFP growth on average in the industry. These plants extract scale efficiencies over technological progress to fuel TFP growth. The youngest plants start with the lowest productivity growth at the initial time period, but they catch up older plants productivity, which present the highest average growth rate through years. This may indicate a ‘learning-by-doing’ process for the industry.     

Ownership transformation,firm performance and manufacturing growth in China

Many commentators and researchers have attributed the manufacturing success in China to its ownership reforms. Using a micro database from the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics, this paper documents and quantifies this development. With systematic and robust analyses, it shows that the development of private ownership indeed played an essential role in improving firm performance and the allocation and utilization of production resources in the Chinese manufacturing sector. In addition, the paper estimates the contributions of firms under different ownership to manufacturing growth, showing that the development of private ownership was the driving force of manufacturing growth in China. The strong credible evidence has important policy implications for further maintaining sustainable development in China.     

Knowledge and productivity in the world’s largest manufacturing corporations

This paper develops a model linking firm knowledge with productivity. The model captures three characteristics of firm knowledge (capital, diversity and relatedness) that are tested on a sample of 156 of the world’s largest corporations. Panel data regression models suggest that unlike knowledge diversity, knowledge capital and knowledge relatedness explain a substantial share of the variance of firm productivity. Relatedness matters because it lowers coordination costs between heterogeneous activities. Consequently, the traditional econometric specification has repeatedly underestimated by 15 percent the overall short-run contribution of intangible assets to firm productivity. This underestimation becomes fiercer in high-technology sectors.     

Long-run technical change and multifactor productivity growth in US manufacturing

This study utilizes a translog cost function to produce econometric estimates of the separate influences of technical change versus scale efficiency in contributing to multifactor productivity growth within the US manufacturing sector. The analysis generates (two-digit) industry-specific parameters that capture the effects of output versus time-related shifts in the cost function over the 1949–1991 period. Thus initial evidence concerning the relative importance of technical progress (versus ‘scale’) cannot be provided as a source of productivity gains within two-digit industries. The parametric estimates of total factor productivity growth are compared with existing Divisia measures to explore the shortcomings of the growth accounting technique. These long-run patterns hold implications for the productivity convergence hypothesis traced to knowledge spillovers between industries.