Estimating technical change in aggregate production functions: a critique

This paper extends the approach of Simon and Shaikh and demonstrates that the estimates of aggregate production functions can provide no independent evidence of the underlying technology of the economy. It is further shown that estimates of labour and capital augmenting technical progress will merely be equal, by definition, to the growth rates of real wages and of the real rental price of capital respectively. This is illustrated by reference to recent studies that estimate technical progress for the Australian manufacturing industries.     

The impact of technical change on the aggregate production function

This study endeavours to look at both disembodied technical progress and embodied technical progress in the capital stock and in the labour force in the United States over the period 1947–80. The results suggest that disembodied technical progress has been about 3% per year, embodied technical progress in the capital stock is approximately 3–4% per year and educational attainment significantly enhances labour productivity. Finally, when the issue of structural stability of the underlying production relationship is addressed, the period 1971–80 gives rise to some inconsistency.     

统一利润率与差别利润率——兼论两种均衡体系的比较

瓦尔拉斯把资本形成方程引入一般均衡体系后出现了内在的不一致性,从而在异质资本品的假设下,一般均衡体系只存在“差别利润率”。在斯拉法体系中,不同的资本品部门却拥有“统一利润率”。两种类型的利润率体现了两种均衡体系的对立。与“差别利润率”相联系的一般均衡体系只研究一般生产过程中的资源配置,体现技术关系;而与“统一利润率”相对应的斯拉法体系则涉及特定市场经济关系下的总量分配,体现社会关系。而后者才可以更好地解释市场经济中的现实问题。     

Aggregate profitability and income distribution in the UK corporate sector, 1963–1985

This paper analyses the secular and cyclical behaviour of the rate of profit for the UK corporate sector from 1962 to 1985, using the growth accounting framework developed by Weisskopf (1979) for the USA, and the labour share decomposition of Henley (1987). The results show that the five per cent per annum decline in net profit rate in the UK over the period is explained in part by each of the three factors of declining profit share, declining capital productivity and, to a lesser extent, declining capacity utilization. As in the USA profitability peaks prematurely in each business cycle as a result of distributional pressure. Further decomposition of these components points to the importance of inadequate growth of real labour productivity as an explanatory factor, and to the inability of firms to protect profit share from the effect of the pre-1979 growing employer labour tax burden. The post-1980 profit revival in the UK is not explained by a ‘breakthrough’ in terms of an improved growth rate of labour or capital productivity but rather by the sheer length of the sustained business upswing and, as yet, absence of the usual midcycle upward pressure on labour share.     

A New Technical Progress Function (1962)

Abstract. In this paper, I show that labour‐saving or capital‐saving technical progress is induced by the distribution of income between capital and labour. In the long run, technical progress is Harrod neutral. The long‐run equilibrium factor income distribution is determined by a parameter of the technical progress function.     

Transformation bias in the costs and benefits of housing subsidies

This note investigates the importance of testing the validity of the Hicks-neutral technical progress assumption in the context of examining the substitutability or complementarity between capital, labour and energy in the UK industrial sector, It is found that the hypothesis of neutral technical progress must be rejected in favour of the non-neutral hypothesis: with technical progress thus biased to using both capital and energy but to saving labour. In addition, it is found that all three factors are substitutable for one another when non-neutral technical progress is modelled.     

中国经济增长动力及前景分析

中国经济在过去26年间持续快速增长,高增长的动力是什么?未来10—20年,能否继续保持这种态势?引起了国内外广泛的关注。本文通过建立中国经济增长的综合因素模型,得出如下基本结论:资本投入增加是中国经济增长最主要的源泉,包括结构升级、人力资本效率提高、制度变迁等在内的技术进步的贡献也较强,劳动投入增加的贡献相对较弱,这与中国劳动力供给相对过剩、劳动边际效率较低有关。未来16年,中国经济仍可望继续保持适度较快增长,但要达到目前的高速度,将面临投资率继续增高,能源约束加大等矛盾。大力转变经济增长方式是解决这一症结的根本途径。     

The Fossil Production Function in a Vintage Model

This paper extends the fossil production function to incorporate embodied technical change. The fossil production function provides an alternative to the standard neoclassical explanation for the aggregate production function. In a Classical Ricardian spirit, the paper assumes that capital-using, labour saving technical change prevails, and shows that it generates a fossil production function in Cobb-Douglas form. The power term of the production function mediates the viability of new machines. A sufficient condition for viability is that the power term equals or exceeds the profit share on new machines. Empirical estimates show that this sufficient condition is satisfied, a result inconsistent with the neoclassical interpretation of the aggregate production function.     

The NAIRU reconsidered: why labour market deregulation may raise unemployment

According to the mainstream theory of equilibrium unemployment, persistent unemployment is caused mainly by ‘excessive’ labour market regulation, whereas aggregate demand, capital accumulation and technological progress have no lasting effect on unemployment. We show that the mainstream non‐accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) model is a special case of a general model of equilibrium unemployment, in which aggregate demand, investment and endogenous technological progress do have long‐term effects. It follows that labour market deregulation does not necessarily reduce steady‐inflation unemployment. Theoretically, if the decline in real wage growth claims owing to deregulation is smaller than the ensuing decline in labour productivity growth and in the warranted real wage growth, then in that case steady‐inflation unemployment may increase. Empirical evidence for 20 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries (1984–1997) indicates that the impact of labour market deregulation on OECD unemployment is zero, and possibly negative (causing a higher rate of unemployment).     

Economic structure and factor payments

There is a growing body of evidence that the labour payment share in national income varies across countries and over time, suggesting that the popular aggregate Cobb–Douglas production function may not capture income share dynamics. There remains conflicting evidence on the importance of natural resource rents among low income economies and on estimates of the rate of return to produced capital. This paper focuses on the structural differences among countries, confirming the importance of the agriculture sector in estimates of labour and land’s share of factor income based on 81 countries at diverse levels of economic development in the year 2005. I find that cross-country data are best modelled by a CES production function with an elasticity of substitution of 0.8 and that many low income countries have a higher return to capital than the United States.     

Profit rate dynamics, income distribution, structural and technical change in Denmark, Finland and Italy

Under less restrictive assumptions than in previous contributions, this paper highlights various patterns of profit rate dynamics that are common to the countries under scrutiny. Without a substantial re-distribution of income in favour of profits, the profit rate declines. When labour productivity is weak the profits/wages ratio declines leading to a decline in the profit rate, also due to capital deepening. Developments in the capital-labour ratio tend to increase the organic composition of capital while those in the ratio between the capital price deflator and the average wage tend to decrease it. Falls in the profit rate took place in countries with a weak technological change with episodes of Marxian bias. Employment shifted from low to high capital intensity sectors, from low to high organic composition industries and from low to high productivity sectors. Rising strength of labour and realization failures tend to have a greater role than rising organic composition in cyclical profit rate dynamics. Over the cycle, the first mechanism is also the first one to show up, while the others tend to follow it. Theoretical and policy implications are offered.     

The productivity effect of government capital in developing and industrialized countries

This paper uses an aggregate production function to examine the effect of government capital formation on growth of labour productivity in an annual panel of 12 developing and 12 OECD economies covering the period 1976–1989. The results from a pooled model of all 24 countries indicate that contribution of government capital to labour productivity is positive and statistically significant. This result also holds in separate samples of the industrialized and developing economies where we find that, while there are productivity differentials between the two types of economies with respect to private capital, there are no differences with regards to public capital.     

Marxist Theories of Crisis and the Current Economic Crisis

Abstract

This paper uses data from the US economy and finds that among Marxist theories of crisis the marxian law of the falling rate of profit as a result of the increasing composition of capital explains the crisis of the 1970s and the end of the “golden age” of capital accumulation. Despite the dramatic increase in the rate of surplus value and the limited fall in the capital-output ratio profitability has not recovered sufficiently during the neoliberal period due to the survival of lagging capitals and the increasing use of unproductive labor. Financialization is one of the effects of low profitability. In the recent years financial bubbles the associated wealth effects and the significant increase in the debt of all domestic sectors raised aggregate demand and provided the stimulus for the anemic growth of the period. The break of the bubbles implies the return to the weak fundamentals of the real economy and possibly a deep and prolonged period of stagnation and crisis.     

The Impact of Technical Change and Profit on Investment in Australian Manufacturing

This paper combines W.E.G. Salter's analysis of capital-embodied technical change with Kalecki's analysis of financing investment from retained profits to provide a Post Keynesian model of investment with process innovation, which is applied to data from Australian manufacturing industries. The approach to process innovation taken in this study is to identify new capital stock introduced through physical investment, which results in the older vintage stock being decommissioned as technologically obsolete. In the estimated model, the profit factor is used as a measure of the ability to invest, and the rate of labour productivity growth factor reveals the inducement to invest as this rate acts as a proxy for technical change in the Kaleckian investment-ordering model. The two factors combine to explain the accumulation process, both level and variability, and its link to technical change. In conclusion, this paper demonstrates that investment, incorporating technical change, enables industries to become sustainable into the uncertain future with varying states of investment instability.

…technical progress cannot be regarded as automatic and independent of accumulation. (Salter, 1966, p. 72)     

Capital Commitment and Cournot Competition with Labour-managed and Profit-maximising Firms

The behaviour of labour managed and profit seeking firms in a Cournot duopoly with capital strategic interaction is analysed. When a pure labour managed duopoly is considered, firms choose their capital commitments according to the level of the interest rate, unlike what usually happens when only profit maximising firms operate in the market. If we consider a mixed duopoly, the profit maximising firm under-invests while the labour managed firm over-invests regardless of the rental cost of capital     

Endogenous technological progress in a multi-sector growth model

This paper presents an endogenous growth model driven by human capital, where human capital can be allocated across three sectors: the production of the final consumption good, the educational sector and the production of technological capital (in the form of knowledge or ideas). In our model, which also includes public expenditure and population growth, labor augmenting technical progress is endogenous and this enriches the transitional dynamics of the economy. With respect to ideas-based growth models, we assume knowledge is produced according to a neoclassical technology, combining ideas and human capital. Such an assumption is motivated by empirical works showing the existence of significant decreasing returns in the creation of ideas at the aggregate level (as Kortum, 1993; and Pessoa, 2005) and of the weak relationship between some inputs of the knowledge production process (as the number of researchers) and the total factor productivity growth rate (as Jones, 2002). Under some general conditions, this economy exhibits the existence of a steady state equilibrium and an unstable multidimensional manifold. Numerical examples are provided to show the existence of stable arms.     

总需求、国际贸易与我国省际生产率变化——基于省际面板数据的研究

全要素生产率的提高是促进经济持续增长的重要原因,对生产率的研究,主要是从供给方面展开的,本文试图从需求角度研究全要素生产率变动的原因。理论上看,总需求通过影响技术创新、技术选择、规模经济效益和要素的使用效率等途径引起生产率的变化,国际贸易则通过促进分工深化、产生技术溢出等促进生产率的提高。然后,本文采用数据包络分析方法测算了中国省际全要素生产率变化,并将其分解为技术效率的变化和技术进步。结果发现中国改革开放以来全要素生产率增长主要是技术进步的结果,技术效率的作用很小。在测算和分解的基础上,利用省际面板数据,就总需求和国际贸易对生产率增长的影响作了实证分析,发现最终消费和资本形成对技术进步和全要素生产率的提高作用显著,出口对生产率增长的作用不显著,进口显著地促进了省际全要素生产率增长和技术进步。     

The Impact of Productivity Growth on the Costs of Production in Australian Manufacturing Industries*

The primary objective of this study is to examine the impact of technological progress on costs of production in 34 Australian manufacturing industries. An analytical model incorporating the notion of factor-augmenting technological change was developed and applied to each industry. The results indicated that in most of the industries technological progress during the period 1954–55 to 1981–82 had been biased towards augmenting labour and thereby reducing the cost of labour per unit of production. The implication of the analysis is that there is a nexus between incomes policy and the rate and bias of factor-augmenting technological change.     

A note on the organic composition of capital and profit rates

It is widely believed that the rate of profit across industrialsectors, while not in fact uniform as stipulated in the theoryof prices of production, is independent of the sectoral organiccomposition of capital. It follows that the simple labour theoryof value must be systematically in error as a predictor of actualsectoral aggregate prices. We offer empirical evidence fromthe US economy (1987 input–output table) suggesting thatthis is not so: there is a substantial and statistically significantnegative association between organic composition and profitrate across sectors.     

A two-sector Kaleckian model of growth and distribution with endogenous productivity dynamics

This study extends a two-sector Kaleckian model of output growth and income distribution by incorporating endogenous labour productivity growth. The model is composed of investment goods and consumption goods production sectors. The impact of a change in wage and profit shares on capacity utilisation and output growth rates at the sectoral and aggregate levels are identified. The study reveals short-run cyclical capacity utilisation rates and productivity growth dynamics. Even if the short-run steady state is stable, the capital accumulation rate in the consumption goods sector must decrease more than that in the investment sector for long-run stability. When simultaneous rises in profit shares in both the sectors affect long-run aggregate economic growth differently at a steady state, the distributional interests between the same class in different sectors may hamper the long-run economic growth. A policy message is that the effect of income distribution on industrial output growth is not always beneficial. These phenomena are specific to two-sector models and cannot be observed when using conventional aggregate growth models.