AN ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN DIFFERENCES IN ECONOMIC GROWTH: A STOCHASTIC FRONTIER APPROACH

Total factor productivity (TFP), factor accumulation, and growth are analysed for a panel of 40 countries in 2001–11. TFP growth and technical inefficiency are estimated using a stochastic frontier model. Environmental variables are found to have an important role in explaining differences in inefficiency across countries. Over 2001–11, the general improvement in technical efficiency of countries is almost outweighed by technological regress. Results indicate that differences in factor accumulation between OECD and emerging economies are more important than differences in TFP change to explain differences in economic growth. Results also indicate negative and significant random shocks for the OECD countries.     

The effects of human capital composition on technological convergence

This paper empirically investigates whether the contribution of human capital to productivity growth depends on the composition of human capital and proximity to the technology frontier in a panel of 87 sample countries over the period 1970–2004. It tests the hypothesis that primary and secondary education is more suitable for imitation whereas tertiary education is more appropriate for innovation. The results show that the growth enhancing effects of higher education increase with proximity to the technology frontier only for high and medium income countries.     

How important are dual economy effects for aggregate productivity?

This paper brings together development accounting techniques and the dual economy model to address the role that factor markets have in creating variation in aggregate total factor productivity (TFP). Development accounting research has shown that much of the variation in income across countries can be attributed to differences in TFP. The dual economy model suggests that aggregate productivity is depressed by having too many factors allocated to low productivity work in agriculture. Data show large differences in marginal products of similar factors within many developing countries, offering prima facie evidence of this misallocation. Using a simple two-sector decomposition of the economy, this article estimates the role of these misallocations in accounting for the cross-country income distribution. A key contribution is the ability to bring sector-specific data on human and physical capital stocks to the analysis. Variation across countries in the degree of misallocation is shown to account for 30–40% of the variation in income per capita, and up to 80% of the variation in aggregate TFP.     

Entrepreneurship culture,total factor productivity growth and technical progress: Patterns of convergence towards the technological frontier

A firm's set of knowledge processes may be affected by the entrepreneurial culture of the country in which it is located. Total factor productivity, mainly associated with technical progress, accounts for most differences over time and across countries. In the present work we examine the determinants of total factor productivity growth in 26 OECD countries between 1965 and 2010, breaking them down into changes in technical efficiency and shifts in technology over time. Using the US as the technology frontier, different patterns of productivity growth emerge between world technology leaders and countries with low initial levels of productivity. Whereas changes in efficiency seem to be the main result of the evolution in the stock of knowledge in technologically dependent economies, suggesting that less advanced economies can benefit from their relative backwardness, domestic research effort appears to be a relevant factor for technology leaders.     

Sources of the German Productivity Demise: Tracing the Effects of Industry-Level Information and Communication Technology Investment

Abstract. While the United States experienced two successive labor productivity surges in 1995 and 2000, Germany's productivity declined dramatically during the same period. We examine the sources of Germany's productivity demise using the ifo industry growth accounting database that provides detailed industry-level investment information. While much attention has focused on the reduction in German labor hours, our data show that information and communication technology (ICT) investment in Germany was deeply lacking in the mid-1990s as compared with the United States. The transition to the new economy mitigated the German productivity slowdown, but did not reverse it. After 2000, we find that a recovery in Non-ICT investment was offset by a widespread collapse in German total factor productivity. Over half of the German industries (accounting for almost 50 per cent of German output) experienced negative total factor productivity growth. This second major difference between the United States and German industry performance explains Germany's secular departure from the technological frontier.     

Human capital aggregation and relative wages across countries

Most of the growth accounting literature relies on an aggregate production function to determine the contribution of factors of production relative to that of total factor productivity (TFP) in explaining differences in incomes across countries. I show that the importance of TFP in accounting for cross-country income differences depends crucially on how skilled and unskilled labor are aggregated. Further, cross-country evidence on the relationship between relative wages and relative endowments of skilled and unskilled labor suggests that the two types of labor should not be aggregated into a single factor of production. Growth accounting decomposition using a commonly used nested-CES aggregate production function that allows skilled and unskilled labor to be used as separate factors of production results in a significantly greater role for TFP in accounting for income differences across countries than that found by past studies. The finding that different aggregate production functions lead to significantly different conclusions about the role of TFP in accounting for cross-country income differences calls for a more general approach to understanding such differences.     

Catching up to the technology frontier: the dichotomy between innovation and imitation

Abstract Using data for 55 developing and developed countries, this research examines the roles of technology transfer, research intensity, educational attainment, and the ability to absorb foreign technology in explaining cross‐country differences in productivity growth. The results show that innovation is an important factor for growth in OECD countries, whereas growth in developing countries is driven by imitation. Furthermore, the interaction between educational attainment and the distance to the frontier is a significant determinant of growth in the overall sample.     

Productivity growth in east Asia: a reappraisal

In recent years there has been considerable disagreement over the extent to which productivity growth has accounted for the success of the east Asian economies. Empirical evidence, based on forms of growth accounting or direct estimation of a production function, is inconclusive so that the debate appears to be at a stalemate. This article applies an alternative approach, using the Malmquist productivity indices, to investigate the contribution of productivity to the longer term growth. The results support the view that over the longer term, the east Asian economies were input driven but interesting differences arise between countries when shorter periods are analysed.     

中国城市化进程中农民工对经济产出的贡献与收益分享

在城市化进程中,农民工群体已经成为中国城市第二、三产业劳动力的重要组成部分。文章充分考虑了农民工与城镇职工在劳动生产率和劳动强度上的差异,运用柯布-道格拉斯生产函数分析1991～2010年农民工群体对中国非农经济产出的贡献率及其收入水平,得出的基本结论是:农民工对我国非农经济产出的贡献率平均为16.37%,其对中国国民经济增长做出了重要贡献,相应地,农民工群体的收入水平相对于其对非农经济产出的贡献比城镇职工偏低。城镇职工对非农经济产出的贡献是农民工的1.63倍,然而城镇职工收入平均是农民工收入的3.43倍。文章的研究结论为中国"十二五"期间新一轮扩大内需政策提供了新的思路。     

Public and private inputs in aggregate production and growth: a cross-country efficiency approach

In a cross section of OECD countries, we replace the macroeconomic production function by a production possibility frontier, total factor productivity being the composite effect of efficiency scores and possibility frontier changes. We consider, for the periods 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000 one output – GDP per worker – and three inputs – human capital, public physical capital per worker and private physical capital per worker. We use a semi-parametric analysis, computing Malmquist productivity indexes, and we also resort to stochastic frontier analysis. Results show that private capital is important for growth, although public and human capital also contribute positively. A governance indicator, a nondiscretionary input, explains inefficiency. Better governance helps countries to achieve a better performance. Nonparametric and parametric results coincide rather closely on the movements of the countries vis-à-vis the possibility frontier and on their relative distances to the frontier.     

Why do Aggregate Production Functions Work? Fisher’s simulations,Shaikh’s identity and some new results

The literature on aggregation has shown that the conditions for successful aggregation of micro production functions into an aggregate production function are far too stringent to be believable (Fisher 1969, 1971). Despite this, aggregate production functions continue being used. The reason is that they seem to 'work'. This happens, however, because underlying every aggregate production function is the income accounting identity that links input and output, i.e. output equals wages plus profits. A simple algebraic transformation of this identity yields a form that resembles a production function (Shaikh, 1974, 1980). This paper uses Monte Carlo simulations to study two questions. First, how much spuriousness can help explain the relatively good fits of the Cobb-Douglas production function? The simulations show that the contribution of spuriousness to a high R 2 is minor once we properly account for the fact that input and output data used in production function estimations are linked through the income accounting identity. It is mostly the link through this identity that explains the results. Secondly, we study how much factor shares have to vary in an economy so as to render the Cobb-Douglas production function with a time trend a bad choice for modelling and estimation purposes. We conclude that the Cobb-Douglas form is robust to relatively large variations in the factor shares. What makes this form often fail are the variations in the growth rates of the wage and profit rates.     

Misallocation and aggregate productivity across time and space

Productivity is at the core of the large differences in income per capita across countries. What accounts for international productivity differences? I discuss cross‐country differences in the allocation of inputs across heterogeneous production units—misallocation—as a potential factor in accounting for aggregate productivity. Policies and institutions generating misallocation are prevalent in poor and developing countries and may also be responsible for differences in the selection of operating producers and technology used, contributing substantially to aggregate productivity differences across countries.     

The pre-Great Recession slowdown in productivity

In the years since the Great Recession, many observers have highlighted the slow pace of productivity growth around the world. For the United States and Europe, we highlight that this slow pace began prior to the Great Recession. The timing thus suggests that it is important to consider factors other than just the deep crisis itself or policy changes since the crisis. For the United States, at the frontier of knowledge, there was a burst of innovation and reallocation related to the production and use of information technology in the second half of the 1990s and the early 2000s. That burst ran its course prior to the Great Recession. Continental European economies were falling back relative to that frontier at varying rates since the mid-1990s. We provide VAR and panel-data evidence that changes in real interest rates have influenced productivity dynamics in this period. In particular, the sharp decline in real interest rates that took place in Italy and Spain seem to have triggered unfavorable resource reallocations that were large enough to reduce the level of total factor productivity, consistent with recent theories and firm-level evidence.     

Biased Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function

This paper offers a classical model of biased technical change in the MarxRicardo tradition as a framework for theoretical and applied studies of growth. The observable data it generates would appear to an unsuspecting economist to be well-described by a neoclassical model with a static Cobb-Douglas production function, when in fact this production function describes only the technological history of the economy. The CobbDouglas form results from the capital-using, labour-saving bias of technical change. The model's trajectory in wage-profit space will lie along the displaced image of the neoclassical factor price frontier, in contradiction to marginal productivity theory. The Solow residual can be reinterpreted by the classical theory as a measure of the size of this displacement.     

Trade, technology transfer and national efficiency in developing countries

This paper simultaneously explores the determinants of the developing countries’ production frontier and these countries’ ‘efficiency’ in using the available resources and technology. In doing so it allows for the transfer of (industrial country) technology in determining the frontier and for international trade's influence on absorptive capacity and national efficiency levels. Stochastic frontier analysis is used to model the production frontier for 57 developing countries for the period 1970-1998, to measure cross-country and temporal differences in efficiency levels and to explain the differences in efficiency levels. The results indicate significant differences in efficiency levels across countries and regions and movement over time, and an important influence of trade and trade policy in raising output both through technology improvements embodied in imported capital goods and by inducing efficiency improvements.     

The productivity debate of East Asia revisited: a stochastic frontier approach

This paper applies a stochastic frontier production model to the data from Penn World Table's 49 countries over the period 1965 to 1990, to decompose total factor productivity growth into technical change and technical efficiency change. Empirical results show East Asian countries led the world in productivity growth, mainly because their technical efficiency gain was so much faster than that of other countries. East Asian countries also registered rapid technical change, which was comparable to that of the G6 countries after the late 1980s. The results provide evidence that negate the hypothesis that East Asian growth was mostly input-driven and unsustainable.     

农业劳动生产率增长分布演进的影响因素分析

深入分析农业劳动生产率增长分布演进的影响因素,对于促进农民农业收入的持续增长有着重要意义。本文利用2006-2010年浙江农户微观面板数据,基于随机前沿模型,将农业劳动生产率增长分解为5个因素的变化,采用反事实分析法,比较分析农业劳动生产率虚拟分布与真实分布的差异,进而判断各因素对农业劳动生产率增长分布演进的影响。结果表明：劳均农业物质费用投入和技术效率是农业劳动生产率增长分布位置与形态演进的主要原因,前沿技术则主要影响农业劳动生产率增长分布形态的演进,而劳均土地面积和农业劳动力数量对农业劳动生产率增长分布演进的作用较小。     

Information Technology and the World Growth Resurgence

Abstract. This paper analyzes the impact of investment in information technology (IT) on the recent resurgence of world economic growth. We describe the growth of the world economy, seven regions, and 14 major economies during the period 1989–2004. We allocate the growth of world output between input growth and productivity and find, surprisingly, that input growth greatly predominates! Moreover, differences in per capita output levels are explained by differences in per capita input, rather than variations in productivity. The contributions of IT investment have increased in all regions, but especially in industrialized economies and Developing Asia.     

1978-2007年我国畜牧业全要素生产率及其影响因素研究

本文运用扩展的索洛模型和C-D生产函数测算了1978—2007年我国畜牧业全要素生产率(TFP)及其影响因素。分析结果表明,1978—2007年我国畜牧业TFP的年均增长率为4.71%;从总体上看,我国畜牧业生产处于规模报酬递增阶段,且畜牧业政策、劳动者质量、规模化程度和科技投入量是影响我国畜牧业TFP变动的主要因素。     

Technical Efficiency in Australian Textile and Clothing Firms: Evidence From the Business Longitudinal Survey

This paper estimates technical efficiency of Australian textile and clothing firms based on the data obtained from the Business Longitudinal Survey (BLS) conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Using a Cobb Douglas stochastic production frontier the paper examines firm level technical efficiency in the time varying inefficiency effect model with technical inefficiency effects assumed as an independently distributed truncated normal variable. Estimates of the production frontier revealed significant but small elasticities of labour and capital for textile and clothing firms, respectively, and a negative (but insignificant) Hicks neutral technical change for both. Estimated coefficients of the explanatory variables for inefficiency effects indicated that technical efficiency varied significantly according to firms' age, size, capital intensity, proportion of non-production to total workers and type of legal status. Predicted firm specific efficiency varied from 16 per cent to 95 per cent and mean efficiency ranged between 30 to 70 per cent. In view of these results policies have been suggested to improve technical efficiency of the firms as well as productivity growth of the sub sectors.