on the undesirability of commodity taxation even when income taxation is not optimal abstract an important result due to atkinson and stiglitz 1976 atkinson a b stiglitz j e 1976 the design of tax structure direct versus indirect taxation journal of public economics 6 55 75 is that differential commodity taxation is not optimal in the presence of an optimal nonlinear income tax given weak separability of utility between labor and all consumption goods this article demonstrates that this conclusion holds regardless of whether the income tax is optimal in particular given any commodity tax and income tax system differential commodity taxation can be eliminated in a manner that results in a pareto improvement also differential commodity taxation can be proportionally reduced so as to generate a pareto improvement in addition for commodity tax reforms that neither eliminate nor proportionally reduce differential taxation a simple efficiency condition is offered for determining whether a pareto improvement is possible

pigou meets mirrlees on the irrelevance of tax distortions for the second best pigouvian tax this paper extends the mirrlees 1971 model of optimal income redistribution with optimal corrective taxes to internalize consumption externalities using general utility structures and exploring both linear and non linear taxes it is demonstrated that the optimal second best tax on an externality generating good should not be corrected for the marginal cost of public funds since it equals one in the optimal tax system in the optimum distortions of income taxes are equal to marginal redistributional gains if the government does not have access to a non distortionary marginal source of finance the marginal cost of public funds can be either larger or smaller than one depending on subjective preferences for income redistribution the optimal second best corrective tax is then either higher or lower than the pigouvian level the findings in this paper generalize and amend prior results based on representative agent models shedding new light on the weak double dividend hypothesis and on the welfare gains of recycling revenue from environmental taxes

productive performance technology heterogeneity and hierarchies who to compare with whom in this paper we argue that inappropriate handling of technological heterogeneity distorts the benchmarking process eroding performance scores country and industry specific frontier studies have been the dominant approaches in explaining productivity differentials stating that heterogeneous performance patterns are attributed to different sources however studies bringing together the above approaches have not been surfaced yet we fill that void by partitioning the metafrontier to account for alternative technological hierarchies to disentangle the layers of complexity triggering heterogeneous performance we introduce two types of heterogeneity each one referring to different stages of the performance evaluation process to identify the decision making unit specific heterogeneity type attached to each entity we propose the w ratio as a result of an iterative algorithm developed herein in order to identify the hierarchical structural heterogeneity type arising under alternative hierarchical structures we define thresholds of heterogeneity using data on seventeen european countries and thirteen industries from manufacturing and transportation from 1999 through 2006 and employing a control function approach with one endogenous covariate we find that the dsh and the hsh type are endogenously related via the role of the state dependence while the path dependence phenomenon is a major catalyst for future technological achievements and productivity improvements transition economies and fragmented industries exhibit persistent technological heterogeneity regardless of the technological structure adopted since further development is mostly affected by past characteristics of the economic environment implying low subsequent competitiveness

when where and how to estimate persistent and transient efficiency in stochastic frontier panel data models abstract in this paper we examine robustness of a recently developed panel data stochastic frontier model that allows for both persistent and transient also known as long run and short run or time invariant and time varying inefficiency along with random firm effects heterogeneity and noise we address some concerns that the practitioners might have about this model first given that there are two random time invariant components persistent inefficiency and firm effects the concern is whether the model can accurately identify them and if so how precisely can the model estimate them second there are two time varying random components transient inefficiency and noise and the concern is whether the model can separate noise from transient inefficiency and if so how precisely can the model estimate transient inefficiency third how well are persistent and transient inefficiency estimated under different scenarios viz under different configurations of the variance parameters of the four random components given that the model is quite complex relatively new and becoming quite popular in the panel efficiency literature we feel that there is need for a detailed simulation study to examine when where and how one can use this model with confidence to estimate persistent and transient inefficiency

growth of factor productivity in the turkish manufacturing industry at provincial level karadag m onder a o and deliktas e 2005 growth of factor productivity in the turkish manufacturing industry at provincial level regional studies 39 213 223 this paper estimates the total factor productivity tfp change of the private and public sectors in the turkish manufacturing industry in the selected provinces for 1990 98 it uses data envelopment analysis to compute malmquist productivity indices decomposed into two components namely efficiency change and technical change the results show that many of the provinces show improvement in tfp on average for the public sector while in the private sector only half the provinces show growth in tfp overall evidence of catching up can be observed only in the private sector the results also reveal that technical progress plays the main role in productivity growth

a malmquist based approach to change in local economic well being murias p novello s and martinez roget f a malmquist based approach to change in local economic well being regional studies the focus on the multifaceted nature of well being has increased substantially in recent years this paper employs data envelopment analysis dea combined with the malmquist index to examine the temporal change in the economic well being of spanish provinces over the ten year period between 1996 and 2006 this method not only allows the aggregation of multiple indicators and the estimation of well being shifts over time but also shows the sources of variation in local economic well being the results seem to suggest that whilst economic well being has improved in the great majority of provinces this advancement stems largely from a more favourable environment than from the specific capacity of each province to reduce its relative distance from key benchmarks

is corruption grease grit or a gamble corruption increases variance of productivity across countries the effect of corruption on economic growth has attracted interest in empirical development economics the conventional view of corruption as impediment for growth has been challenged by the grease on the wheels hypothesis we take a new perspective on the issue and suggest corruption as macro risk referred to as a gamble hypothesis using cross country data and two alternative indicators of corruption we find corruption to be a significant driver of heteroscedasticity in total productivity this supports the new gamble hypothesis we also note some misleading interpretations in the previously published frontier applications to avoid these shortcomings we apply a flexible semi nonparametric estimator

how ambitious are china and india s emissions intensity targets abstract several developing economies have announced carbon emissions targets for 2020 as part of the negotiating process for a post kyoto climate policy regime china and india s commitments are framed as reductions in the emissions intensity of the economy by 40 45 and 20 25 respectively between 2005 and 2020 how feasible are the proposed reductions in emissions intensity for china and india and how do they compare with the targeted reductions in the us and the eu in this paper we use a stochastic frontier model of energy intensity to decompose energy intensity into the effects of input and output mix climate and a residual technology variable we use the model to produce emissions projections for china and india under a number of scenarios regarding the pace of technological change and changes in the share of non fossil energy we find that china is likely to need to adopt ambitious carbon mitigation policies in order to achieve its stated target and that its targeted reductions in emissions intensity are on par with those implicit in the us and eu targets india s target is less ambitious and might be met with only limited or even no dedicated mitigation policies

value added educational accountability approaches and their effects on schools rankings evidence from chile abstract value added models have been proposed to analyze different aspects related to school effectiveness on the basis of student growth there is consensus in the literature about the need to control for socioeconomic status and other contextual variables at student and school level in the estimation of value added for which the methodologies employed have largely relied on hierarchical linear models however this approach is problematic because results are based on comparisons to the school s average implying no real incentive for performance excellence meanwhile activity analysis models to estimate school value added have been unable to control for contextual variables at both the student and school levels in this study we propose a robust frontier model to estimate contextual value added which merges relevant branches of the activity analysis literature namely metafrontiers and partial frontier methods we provide an application to a large sample of chilean schools a relevant country to study due to the reforms made to its educational system that point out to the need of accountability measures results indicate not only the general relevance of including contextual variables but also how they contribute to explaining the performance differentials found for the three types of schools public privately owned subsidized and privately owned fee paying also the results indicate that contextual value added models generate school rankings more consistent with the evaluation models currently used in chile than any other type of evaluation models

rank dynamics and club convergence of sustainable development for countries around the world abstract assessment of country level sustainable development is a critical research topic entrenched in the global battle against climate change this study employs the frontier approach combined with convergence analysis to assess the sustainable development for a set of 121 countries over 1990 2014 focusing on analyzing the countries rank dynamics and convergence behavior the levels of the countries sustainable development are captured by data envelopment analysis a nonparametric frontier approach that can jointly assess a country s economic and environmental performance reflecting the divergent views on the importance of economic and environmental objectives in the pursuit of sustainability the proposed approach generates the countries sustainability scores by prioritizing either economic or environmental criterion this study finds that developed countries have significantly outperformed developing countries if environmental criterion takes precedence over economic criterion in performance assessment moreover regardless of the model employed there is strong evidence of club convergence i e convergence in subgroups of countries to different steady states rather than convergence in full sample we analyze the pattern of convergence paths and discuss policy implications obtained from our empirical findings

textile manufacturing in eight developing countries does business environment matter for firm technical efficiency abstract production frontiers with technical inefficiency determinants are estimated using stochastic models for textile manufacturing in eight developing countries encompassing about 800 firms inefficiency determinants are considered either on an individual basis or in the form of composite indicators reflecting in house or managerial factors and various dimensions of the external environment although each of these two categories of factors is statistically significant the former proves more influential in the explanation of the difference in efficiency between firms simulations are then proposed to assess the efficiency levels that would occur if firms had the opportunity to produce in the most favourable productive environments

testing for efficiency catching up we used advances in data envelopment analysis dea techniques to examine efficiency scores and investigate the issue of convergence and divergence in a cross country analysis specifically we used bootstrapping techniques to examine a data set of 52 developed and developing countries we found that when using the standard dea model some of the results were not robust further we broke the sample into groups to examine club convergence we found that efficiency scores were significantly different between groups and that there was some evidence of convergence of efficiency scores within each group

optimal taxation with rent seeking we develop a framework for optimal taxation when agents can earn their income both in traditional activities where private and social products coincide and in rent seeking activities where private returns exceed social returns either because they involve the capture of pre existing rents or because they reduce the returns to traditional work we characterize pareto optimal income taxes that do not condition on how much of an individual s income is earned in each of the two activities these optimal taxes feature an externality corrective term the magnitude of which depends both on the pigouvian correction that would obtain if rent seeking incomes could be perfectly targeted and on the relative impact of rent seeking externalities on the private returns to traditional and to rent seeking activities if rent seeking externalities primarily affect other rent seekers for example the optimal correction lies strictly below the pigouvian correction a calibrated model indicates that the gap between the pigouvian and optimal correction can be quantitatively important our results thus point to a hefty informational requirement for correcting rent seeking externalities through the income tax code

environmental regulation and u s states technical inefficiency abstract using data on 48 states from 1982 1994 we estimate the impact of environmental regulation on technical inefficiency of u s states manufacturing sector the result indicates that environmental stringency has significant and positive impacts on u s states technical inefficiency

estimation of growth convergence using a stochastic production frontier approach abstract in this paper we estimate stochastic world production frontiers econometrically taking country heterogeneity into account from the estimated frontier we obtain estimates of technical change technological catch up efficiency improvement convergence and scale related components of total factor productivity tfp growth

the benefit of efficiency improvement on growth and convergence a study using japan panel data abstract empirical results through a fixed effects regression model show that technological catch up is three times as effective as capital deepening but both have done much to cause economic convergence among japanese prefectures regions results are contrary to existing research on east asian growth experience

do all countries grow alike abstract this paper investigates the driving forces of output change in 77 countries during the period 1970 2000 a flexible modeling strategy is adopted that accounts for i the inefficient use of resources and ii different production technologies across countries the proposed model can identify technical efficiency and input change for each of three endogenously determined regimes membership in these regimes is estimated rather than determined ex ante this framework enables explorations into the determinants of output growth and convergence issues in each regime

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency change in industrialized countries this paper analyzes productivity growth in 17 oecd countries over the period 1979 1988 a nonparametric programming method activity analysis is used to compute malmquist productivity indexes these are decomposed into two component measures namely technical change and efficiency change we find that u s productivity growth is slightly higher than average all of which is due to technical change japan s productivity growth is the highest in the sample with almost half due to efficiency change jel c43 d24 in this paper we apply recently developed

labour productivity and technology gap in european regions a conditional frontier approach filippetti a and peyrache a labour productivity and technology gap in european regions a conditional frontier approach regional studies a conditional frontier approach is proposed to capture the role of the technology gap in explaining labour productivity differences in 211 european regions in eighteen countries over the years 1995 2007 labour productivity growth is driven by capital accumulation and technical change in lagging behind regions productivity growth is mainly driven by capital accumulation the technology gap does not play a role in driving labour productivity growth and remains stable across regions in the considered period cohesion policy seems more effective in terms of fixed investment rather than technological capabilities while technology gap remains a source of unused potential productivity growth

a note on optimal taxation in the presence of externalities abstract i consider the problem of optimal taxation with externalities in a general setup encompassing most of optimal taxation models found in the literature it is demonstrated that when direct taxation of externalities is possible optimal taxes can be expressed as the sum of the optimal pigouvian taxes and the optimal taxes in a related problem without externalities regardless of what other tax instruments are available this result generalizes the so called principle of targeting

religion and economic performance summary this paper investigates the relationship between religion and economic performance in both cross country and within country regressions the null hypothesis that religious affiliation is uncorrelated with performance can frequently be rejected i e religion matters though the regressions do not yield a robust pattern of coefficients with respect to particular religions the results with respect to islam do not support the notion that it is inimical to growth on the contrary virtually every statistically significant coefficient on muslim population shares reported in this paper in both cross country and within country statistical analyses is positive if anything islam promotes growth

complementarities in the search for innovation managing markets and relationships abstract extant research has characterized a firm s search for external knowledge in its innovation activities as either relational or transactional in nature the former implies that a firm chooses and develops collaborative relationships with knowledge sources like universities customers or suppliers while the latter suggests transactions governed by markets for technology we argue that prior literature has ignored that both search strategies are interrelated and complementary adopting one strategy has a higher marginal return on innovation performance if the other one is present moreover we suggest the benefits from complementarity to be higher when a firm is more distant to the technological frontier in the industry and when markets for technology in that industry are shallow we test our hypotheses on a sample of 3921 german firms from 2001 to 2009 and find support for our hypotheses

economic growth and greenhouse gases in europe a non radial multi sector nonparametric production frontier analysis abstract energy use has become a topical issue when assessing the economic growth of countries indeed energy use gives rise to greenhouse gas emissions which are undesirable side products of economic growth in this paper we present a non radial multi sector nonparametric production frontier approach specially tailored for addressing this issue our approach is consistent with previous works and in line with recent policy and regulation implementations we also make use of second stage country and sector level regression analyses to investigate how the efficiency results are affected by exogenous factors we apply our method to the case of 10 sectors in 19 european countries our results highlight the need for policy and regulation implementations for each sector individually indeed our efficiency and regression results show that there exists a sector heterogeneity and that the room for increasing economic growth reducing greenhouse gas emissions is clearly different for each sector in every country finally our results highlight two sectors 1 agriculture and 2 electricity gas and water and that the europe 2020 objectives are well set since they target the most inefficient countries sectors

multinational operation ownership and efficiency differences in the international oil industry abstract although state involvement in market systems often leads to inefficiency this influence in the oil industry is not dwindling due to strong growth of some state oil companies based on this background there are concerns about how state firms can continue to stay relevant in the international oil industry by offsetting inefficiencies due to state control this study assesses the effects of multinational operations on the performance of oil firms this is achieved by comparing productive and scale efficiencies of state and private oil companies as well as state multinationals and private multinationals a dataset of 50 firms each year from 2001 to 2010 reveals that although multinational operation is important in reducing productive inefficiencies of state firms it does not mitigate scale inefficiencies of state owned firms state firms should therefore make multinational operations a key policy direction since this will provide a transformative agenda towards equally competing with their private counterparts however better efforts need to be paid in reducing scale inefficiencies that are pervasive among state owned oil firms providing better controls on firm size will provide better drive towards future efficient production levels

changing energy intensity of economies in the world and its decomposition abstract this paper decomposes energy intensity change across countries into five components attributable to technological catch up technological progress and changes in capital energy ratio labor energy ratio and output structure it is found that 1 technological progress capital accumulation and output structure change contributed to the decline of energy intensity from 1980 to 2010 2 changes in labor energy ratio drove up energy intensity and 3 spatial and temporal heterogeneity existed regarding relative importance of the five components

ceo compensation and bank efficiency an application of conditional nonparametric frontiers the paper investigates in a dynamic context the effect of chief executive officer ceo bonus and salary payments on banks technical efficiency levels our methodological framework incorporates the latest developments on the probabilistic approach of efficiency measurement as introduced by b din et al 2012 we apply time dependent conditional efficiency estimates to analyse a sample of 37 us banks for the period from 2003 to 2012 the empirical evidence reveals a non linear relationship between ceo bonus and salary payments and banks efficiency levels more specifically it is reported that salary and bonus payments affect differently banks technological change and technological catch up levels finally the empirical evidence suggests that higher salary and bonus payments are not always aligned with higher technical efficiency levels

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 a vis the possibility frontier and on their relative distances to the frontier

understanding solow residuals in latin america despite some improvements in recent years long term economic growth in latin america and the caribbean lac has been rather disappointing over the past decades since 1960 gaps in the gdp per capita of lac countries with respect to not only the united states but also their peers twin economies have widened steadily see table 1 while the typical latin american country1 was around 4 4 times poorer than the united states in 1960 as of 2008 it was 5 5 times poorer the comparison with twin economies countries that in 1960 had a gdp per capita comparable to that in latin america2 is even more remarkable the average lac economy was just 20 percent poorer than its typical twin economy in 1960 in 2008 gdp per capita in latin america was less than half that in the twin economies this persistent decline in relative gdp per capita has been common to all countries in the region with some exceptions of the nineteen lac econo mies in my sample five managed to grow faster than the united states during the 1960 2008 period brazil chile colombia the dominican republic and panama however progress has been quantitatively modest for example if benchmarked to twin economies only the dominican republic and panama managed to grow faster over the same period furthermore in several cases for example brazil progress was made mainly during the 1960s and 1970s with growth being subpar from the debt crisis in the early 1980s onward while the 2000s have been good years in terms of relative growth performance for the region it will still take around 27 years to cut by 50 percent the gdp per capita gap with respect to the united states if the growth differential during 2000 08 of around 1 5 percent per year is to be maintained with respect to the twin economies it will take around 108 years therefore low potential growth continues to be a significant challenge for the region this paper contributes to the understanding of what drives this poor per formance by using new databases and analytical tools to explore the relative importance of productivity and factor accumulation across lac countries with regard to analytical tools the paper provides new evidence from three viewpoints first i perform a careful analysis of different ways of decom posing gdp per capita levels into physical capital human capital and a residual the solow residual often interpreted as a measure of total fac tor productivity tfp representing aggregate economic efficiency but also often viewed as a measure of our ignorance under different assumptions regarding the production function and measurement second i present non parametric estimations of efficiency based on a data envelope analysis that does not rely on the traditionally used cobb douglas production function instead it recognizes that the relevant production possibilities frontier may be a function of factor endowments and thus differ across countries with regard to new data sets this paper uses three newly available sources first in contrast to previous studies focusing on latin america it uses the new version of the barro and lee 2010 data set on educational attainment which addresses several concerns on data quality that arose over the previous ver sion see cohen and soto 2007 as well as de la fuente and domenech 2006 second i also use the latest version of the penn world tables version 7 0 extending the analysis until 2008 doing so allows me to cover the 2000s a decade that has been quite successful for the region in terms of economic growth compared with its past third i use the pisa 2009 test scores from the organization for economic cooperation and development oecd to analyze the importance of cognitive skills and adjust human capital indicators for differences in quality the paper focuses on the decomposition of gdp per worker into physical capital human capital and the solow residual through the use of alternative methods as policy recommendations might differ substantially according to the source of income disparities in particular if policymakers have to estab lish priorities and have limited political capital to implement reforms

toward an economic model of the japanese firm i owe a great deal to professor moses abramovitz who suggested that i write this article i appreciate his constant encouragement and guidance which aided me throughout its preparation i am also indebted to three anonymous referees of the journal and to professors ryutaro komiya and michael riordan for their critical comments and helpful suggestions needless to say i am solely responsible for the views expressed in this paper

energy productivity convergence within the australian construction industry a panel data study abstract energy productivity reflecting the volume of goods and services with one unit consumption of energy has become an important indicator of production and competitiveness within the construction industry in order to understand the long run growth patterns of energy productivity in the australian construction industry this study investigates the convergence of the construction energy productivity across a sample of seven australian regions from 1987 to 2014 and identifies regional clubs for future effective energy consumption strategy of production using a panel data approach the study presents a picture of the impacts of the influential components on the equilibrium and growth patterns of construction energy productivity across the studied regions the findings provide a better understanding of the impact of booms and busts on the australian construction energy productivity at the state level this adds to the body of knowledge on construction productivity by adapting a panel data approach of the convergence study into construction energy productivity

why european banks are less profitable than u s banks a decomposition approach abstract the low profitability of european banks relative to their u s counterparts has recently raised concerns among policy makers and researchers this paper attempts to shed light on this issue by using the o donnell 2012 decomposition approach this approach enables us to decompose the relative profitability of european banks into an output input price index and a total factor productivity index with the former further decomposed into two price indexes and the latter further into four productivity and efficiency measures our results show that european banks profitability was not only weak but also deteriorated over time our further analysis shows that the decline in the output input price index was due to declines in relative lending rate and relative return on securities and an increase in funding costs while the decline in the productivity index was driven by declines in technical efficiency scale efficiency and residual mix efficiency

is corruption an efficient grease this paper tests whether corruption may be an efficient grease in the wheels of an otherwise deficient institutional framework it analyzes the interaction between aggregate efficiency corruption and other dimensions of governance for a panel of 69 countries both developed and developing using two measures of corruption and two other aspects of governance we observe that corruption is less detrimental to efficiency in countries where institutions are less effective it may even be positively associated with efficiency in countries where institutions are extremely ineffective we thus find evidence for the grease the wheels hypothesis in its weak and strong forms

externalities and optimal taxation this paper reexamines the optimal tax design problem income and commodities in the presence of externalities the nature of the second best and the choice of the tax instruments are motivated by the informational structure in the economy the main results are i environmental levies linear or nonlinear differ in formula from pigouvian taxes by the expressions for the optimal tax on private goods ii externalities do not affect commodity tax formulas linear and nonlinear for private goods iii externalities do not affect the income tax structure if commodity taxes are nonlinear and affect it if commodity taxes are linear and iv a general income tax plus strictly pigouvian taxes are sufficient for efficient taxation if individuals of different types have identical marginal rates of substitution at any given consumption bundle

total factor productivity differences appropriate technology vs efficiency abstract recent development and growth accounting studies have established that total factor productivity is an important source of cross country differences in income levels and growth rates this paper makes two contributions first it examines the sensitivity of the development accounting results to the cobb douglas specification of the production function second within the cobb douglas framework it weighs evidence of the two alternative explanations of total factor productivity differences the inefficiency view and the appropriate technology view to accomplish these tasks the world production frontier is estimated using a nonparametric deterministic approach known as data envelopment analysis i find that the fraction of income differences explained by physical and human capital increases from 32 to 55 when departing from the cobb douglas assumption there is also evidence consistent with the appropriate technology view countries with an inadequate mix of inputs are unable to access the most productive technologies moreover the world technology frontier appears to be shifting out faster at input combinations close to that of the rd it explains 43 of output variation in 1995 and its importance has increased over time

hypercongestion in production correspondences an empirical exploration this empirical contribution reviews the rather limited existing literature measuring congestion in production it first compares current ways to measure congestion using nonparametric specifications of technologies in particular it focuses on the magnitude and incidence of the congestion detected in empirical studies using traditional radial efficiency measures thereafter it shows the limitations of this radial measurement and how alternative measurement schemes may reveal higher amounts of congestion then the new more general methodology of measuring s congestion is presented in particular we first present a numerical example to illustrate the way the s disposable technologies allow to capture more extreme forms of congestion by setting empirically determined upper bounds to the wasting of inputs then an empirical illustration is presented based on an existing sample of data a final section concludes

the devil is in the shadow do institutions affect income and productivity or only official income and official productivity this paper assesses the relationship between institutions output and productivity when official output is corrected for the size of the shadow economy our results confirm the usual positive impact of institutional quality on official output and total factor productivity and its negative impact on the size of the underground economy however once output is corrected for the shadow economy the relationship between institutions and output becomes weaker the impact of institutions on total corrected factor productivity becomes insignificant differences in corrected output must then be attributed to differences in factor endowments these results survive several tests for robustness

on the evolution of the world income distribution the post world war ii period has seen substantial changes in the distribution of gdp per worker around the world in the upper half of the distribution a number of countries have exhibited large increases in income relative to the richest countries in the bottom half several countries have seen incomes fall relative to the richest countries the net result of these changes is a movement in the shape of the world income distribution from something that looks like a normal distribution in 1960 to a bi modal twin peaks distribution in 1988 projecting these changes into the future suggests a number of interesting ndings first it seems likely that the united states will lose its position as the country with the highest level of gdp per worker second growth miracles have been more common in recent decades than growth disasters if these dynamics continue the future income distribution will involve far more rich countries and far fewer poor countries than currently observed

nonlinearities and heterogeneity in environmental quality an empirical analysis of deforestation we use a panel data set of 59 developing countries over the 1972 1994 period to study the deforestation process relying on both parametric and semiparametric models we examine nonlinearities and heterogeneity in the deforestation process we first study the existence of an environmental kuznets curve ekc and then analyze determinants of deforestation our data sample provides no evidence of an ekc we also find that political institution failures may worsen the deforestation process in developing countries

why is tfp growth sectorally concentrated research shows that total factor productivity tfp growth is weak in european countries this is inter alia attributed to the fact that substantial tfp growth is limited to a few industries because tfp growth is typically understood as technological progress it is concluded that technology diffusion between sectors in europe is hampered we use eu klems data sets to decompose sectoral tfp for nine european countries by means of a malmquist approach in order to identify potential sources besides technical progress applying harberger diagrams we describe the sectoral distribution of tfp growth efficiency gains and losses economies of scale and technological progress the analysis reveals that technological progress is quite evenly distributed across sectors in most european countries the wide scattering of tfp growth is explained by deviating efficiency developments and the unused economies of scale we conclude that the technology transfer between sectors in most european countries seems to work t

relative sources of european regional productivity convergence a bootstrap frontier approach enflo k and hjertstrand p relative sources of european regional productivity convergence a bootstrap frontier approach regional studies this paper addresses the issue of western european regional productivity growth and convergence by means of data envelopment analysis dea decomposing labour productivity into efficiency change technical change and capital accumulation the decomposition shows that most regions have fallen behind the production frontier in efficiency and that capital accumulation has had a diverging effect on the labour productivity distribution using bootstrapping methods the paper also accounts for the inherent bias and the stochastic elements in the efficiency estimation it is found that the relative ranking of the efficiency scores remains stable after the bias correction even after controlling for spatially correlated measurement errors and that the dea successfully identifies the regions on the production frontier as significantly more efficient than other regions enfl

capital income taxation when inherited wealth is not observable this paper extends the atkinson stiglitz model of direct and indirect taxation to a dynamic setting with two unobservable characteristics productive ability and inherited wealth bequests are motivated by the joy of giving a child s inheritance is a random variable with a probability distribution that depends on his parent s investment in a bequest technology public borrowing is assumed and implies the modified golden rule we study the optimal tax policy when two instruments are available a non linear wage income tax and a proportional tax on capital income we show that the second instrument ought in general to be used but that the tax rate is not necessarily positive however a positive tax rate is more likely when there is a positive correlation between inherited wealth and innate ability

portfolio selection in multidimensional general and partial moment space abstract this paper develops a general approach for the single period portfolio optimization problem in a multidimensional general and partial moment space a shortage function is defined that looks for possible increases in odd moments and decreases in even moments a main result is that this shortage function ensures sufficient conditions for global optimality it also forms a natural basis for developing tests on the influence of additional moments furthermore a link is made with an approximation of an arbitrary order of a general indirect utility function this non parametric efficiency measurement framework permits to differentiate mainly between portfolio efficiency and allocative efficiency finally information can in principle be inferred about the revealed risk aversion prudence temperance and other higher order risk characteristics of investors

coming home and not moving in examining reshoring firms subnational location choices in the united states the relation between firm characteristics i e size and domestic location choice i e home state versus other of reshoring firms contingent on place i e labour cost innovation intensity

redistribution and pollution taxes with non linear engel curves abstract this paper analyses optimal corrective taxation and optimal income redistribution the pigouvian pollution tax is higher if pollution damages disproportionally hurt the poor due to equity weighting of pollution damages moreover under general utility functions optimal pollution taxes should be set below the pigouvian tax if the poor spend a disproportionate fraction of their income on polluting goods however if engel curves are linear optimal pollution taxes should follow the first best rule for the pigouvian corrective tax even if the government wants to redistribute income and the poor spend a disproportional part of their income on polluting goods the often used quasi linear ces and stone geary utility functions all have linear engel curves if engel curves are linear and if pollution taxes are not optimised pareto improving green tax reforms exist that move the pollution tax closer to the pigouvian tax simulations demonstrate that optimal corrective taxes should be pigouvian if the demand for polluting goods is derived from a les demand system but deviate from the pigouvian taxes if demand for polluting goods demand is derived from a piglog demand system

dynamic linkages between diffusion of information communication technology and labour productivity in south asia at present diffusion of information communication technology ict is a significant area of concern for sustainable development and growth of a country regions with abundant labour such as south asia require significant improvements in the diffusion of ict to achieve higher productivity for their labour which in turn can increase the pace of economic growth in this context the objective of this study is to investigate whether ict could be used to improve labour productivity for countries in south asia this study first investigates the general status of diffusion of ict among south asian countries the initial results based on descriptive statistics indicate that there is a significant gap among the south asian countries with maldives having the highest ict facilities second using robust panel data methodologies this study concludes that south asia s drive for higher productivity of its abundant labour force can substantially be improved in the long run by increasing diffusion of ict in the prese

one market one number a composite indicator assessment of eu internal market dynamics we consider the lack of consensus about an appropriate theoretical framework linking sub indicators as a defining characteristic of composite indicators this intrinsic feature implies uncertainties about the appropriate normalization and aggregation of the raw data the two are related index theory offers some valuable guidelines about their connection yet these do not fully solve the basic problem of expert disagreement we embed such residual disagreement in the aggregation method itself specifically we apply an impartial benefit of the doubt weighting procedure where weight restrictions incorporate the available information on experts opinions we apply this procedure to the dynamic performance assessment of eu internal market effects thereby highlighting its capacity to disaggregate member states observed performance shifts into changes relative to benchmarks and performance changes of the benchmarks i e catching up versus genuine progress our results indicate that the latter factor is more important in explaining the observed progress

on the comparative performance of socially responsible and islamic mutual funds this is the first study to provide comprehensive analyses of the relative performance of both socially responsible investment sri and islamic mutual funds the analysis proceeds in two stages in the first the performance of the two categories of funds is measured using partial frontier methods in the second stage we use quantile regression techniques by combining two variants of the free disposal hull fdh methods order m and order in the first stage of analysis and quantile regression in the second stage we provide detailed analyses of the impact of different covariates across methods and across different quantiles in spite of the differences in the screening criteria and portfolio management of both types of funds variation in the performance is only found for some of the quantiles of the conditional distribution of mutual fund performance we established that for the most inefficient funds the superior performance of sri funds is significant in contrast for the best mutual funds this evidence vanished and even islamic funds perform better than sri these results show the benefits of performing the analysis using quantile regression

decomposition of the effect of government size on growth empirical results through a fixed effects regression model show that government size has a negative effect on growth mainly through hampering capital accumulation when a sample is divided into oecd and non oecd countries the negative effect of government size on capital accumulation persists for non oecd countries but not for oecd countries

second best pigouvian taxation a clarification this paper argues that the search for a purely environmental component of a tax on goods or factors of production that impact the environment separate from its redistributive and distortive effects is fraught with difficulties the quest is often impossible because of the interconnectedness between labor supply consumption decisions and the environmental quality the paper differentiates between two conceptualization for the pigouvian tax that have been employed in the literature and argues that each has tried to isolate the environmental component in its own way one conceptualization due to cremer et al j public econ 70 343 364 1998 does so by ruling out direct feedback from changes in environmental quality on the incentive effect of the tax in the second conceptualization due to bovenberg and ploeg s j public econ 55 349 390 1994 incentive effects are ruled out by making consumers valuation of environmental quality independent of the labor supply this is achieved by assuming separability between labor supply and other goods including environmental equality to convey its message the paper studies the properties of optimal polluting and non polluting non labor input taxes in a mirrleesian model with endogenously determined wages

are positional concerns stronger in some domains than in others for more than one hundred years economists have discussed the concept of positional goods that the utility conferred by many perhaps even most goods depends not only on the amount the individual consumes but also on the amount others consume e g thorstein veblen 1899 james duesenberry 1949 john k galbraith 1958 robert frank 1985 while economic interest in positional goods is increasing e g mark pingle and mike mitchell 2002 kenneth arrow et al 2004 ed hopkins and tatiana kornienko 2004 the literature remains largely theoretical rather than empirical if status concerns affect all items in the utility function equally leisure as well as goods the positional effect would operate like a lump sum tax reducing well being without changing the allocation of time or money arrow et al 2004 however if positional concerns are stronger for some things than for others then in order to understand how people can become better off in well being not simply in wealth we must investigate how interpersonal competition interacts with material gains frank 1997 evidence about what goods are more positional than others is essential for correct policy recommendations gregory besharov 2002 but little is actually known about the relative positional rankings of items in the typical consumer s utility function four hypotheses proposed in the literature are

redistribution and optimal mixed taxation in the presence of consumption externalities abstract the literature on externalities and optimal redistributive taxation in the presence of asymmetric information has so far been confined to the case where externalities are of the atmospheric type one of the main results from this literature has been that the so called additivity property discovered by sandmo sandmo a 1975 optimal taxation in the presence of externalities swedish journal of economics 77 86 98 holds true also in this more general context this paper extends previous analyses by considering a general model where even if there is only one externality generating good the externality is not constrained to be of the atmospheric type the model is sufficiently unrestrictive to admit a variety of interpretations for example it is possible to interpret it as reflecting the case of different types of agents being differently vulnerable to the same externality another possibility is to view agents of different types as not equally effective as externality generating units yet another interpretation can be in terms of positional goods we show that while the additivity property fails in general to hold conditions can be derived which are sufficient to recover it both with respect to the commodity tax structure and with respect to the shape of the income tax schedule moreover stressing one or the other of the aforementioned interpretations delivers different results for the validity of the additivity property

the boundaries of multinational enterprises and the theory of international trade this paper begins with a review of empirical evidence on multinational firms conceptual underpinnings of a theory are developed relying in particular on the notion of knowledge capital as a mobile joint input into geographically separated production facilities this idea is embedded in a simple two country general equilibrium model that supports multinational production in equilibrium under conditions consistent with the empirical evidence the final section examines internalization and shows why certain properties of knowledge capital also imply a preference for transferring technologies internally within the firm rather than through arm s length markets

technological change technological catch up and capital deepening relative contributions to growth and convergence we decompose labor productivity growth into components attributable to 1 technological change shifts in the world production frontier 2 technological catch up movements toward or away from the frontier and 3 capital accumulation movement along the frontier the world production frontier is constructed using deterministic methods requiring no specification of functional form for the technology nor any assumption about market structure or the absence of market imperfections we analyze the evolution of the cross country distribution of labor productivity in terms of the tripartite decomposition finding that technological change is decidedly nonneutral and that both growth and bipolar international divergence are driven primarily by capital deepening jel o30 o47 d24

firm heterogeneity persistent and transient technical inefficiency a generalized true random effects model this paper considers a panel data stochastic frontier model that disentangles unobserved firm effects firm heterogeneity from persistent time invariant long term and transient time varying short term technical inefficiency the model gives us a four way error component model viz persistent and time varying inefficiency random firm effects and noise we use bayesian methods of inference to provide robust and efficient methods of estimating inefficiency components in this four way error component model monte carlo results are provided to validate its performance we also present results from an empirical application that uses a large panel of us commercial banks

multinationals multi plant economies and the gains from trade a general equilibrium model of a multinational enterprise based on economies of multi plant operation is developed these economies are modelled as arising from the existence of a joint input whose productivity in each production facility is independent of the number of facilities maintained by a firm the multinational thus offers the world increased technical efficiency by eliminating the duplication of the joint input that would occur with independent national firms since this technical efficiency may come at the expense of increased market power the full determinants of home country host country and world welfare are considered

asymmetric and non atmospheric consumption externalities and efficient consumption taxation abstract we analyze the effects of a generalized class of negative consumption externalities asymmetric and non atmospheric on the structure of efficient commodity tax programs households are not only concerned about consumption reference levels that is they gain utility from keeping up with the joneses but they also exhibit altruism two sets of efficient tax regimes are compared based on a welfarist and a non welfarist optimality criterion respectively altruism turns out not to be at odds with the consumption externalities rather altruism implicates a bound on efficient utility allocations a non welfarist government tolerates less inequality than a welfarist one in the welfarist non welfarist case first best personalized commodity tax rates respond highly sensitively barely to whether or not a consumption externality is asymmetric or non atmospheric if personalized commodity tax rates are not available second best case the tax rate on a non positional good is typically different from zero for corrective reasons for plausible functional forms and parameter values numerical simulations suggest that second best tax rates are rather insensitive with respect to both the optimality criterion and the nature of the consumption externality

technical change it should be positive and make sense abstract we present the results of eight models that differ with respect to the time behavior of technical inefficiency and the presence of country heterogeneity when taken into account heterogeneity raises average technical change estimates however technical progress rankings become counter intuitive

the potential estimation and factor analysis of china s energy conservation on thermal power industry new huadu business school research fund national social science foundation of china 12zd059 ministry of education 10gbj013

entrepreneurship and advancing national level economic efficiency we explore the channels under which entrepreneurship fosters productivity by disentangling its impact on national level economic efficiency and find that more entrepreneurship in aggregate is not always good for economic growth and most importantly identifying the form and activity of entrepreneurship is critical for policy makers to better manage changes in their economies our national level results also suggest that the new product entrepreneurship and to a lesser extent improvement driven opportunity entrepreneurship both significantly contribute to the improvement of national level efficiency however both measures would benefit from further development and it seems a higher coincidence of both is more likely to advance a nation s economic efficiency

a note on efficiency and productivity growth in the korean banking industry 1992 2002 abstract in this paper we present estimates of korean bank inefficiency and productivity change for the period 1992 2002 that are derived from the directional technology distance function our method controls for loan losses that are an undesirable by product arising from the production of loans and allows the aggregation of individual bank inefficiency and productivity growth to the industry level our findings indicate that technical progress during the period was more than enough to offset efficiency declines so that the banking industry experienced productivity growth

dots to boxes do the size and shape of spatial units jeopardize economic geography estimations this paper evaluates in the context of economic geography estimates the magnitude of the distortions arising from the choice of zoning system which is also known as the modifiable areal unit problem maup we consider three standard economic geography exercises the analysis of spatial concentration agglomeration economies and trade determinants using various french zoning systems differentiated according to the size and shape of spatial units which are the two main determinants of the maup while size matters a little shape does so much less both dimensions seem to be of secondary importance compared to specification issues

world financial crisis and efficiency of chinese commercial banks the us credit crunch generated substantial turmoil in the global financial markets and directly caused the collapse of several world banking giants nonetheless chinese commercial banks decoupled from the rest of the world achieved remarkable results because of their risk averse nature and banking reform during the past 10 years to improve corporate governance and efficiency the latest reform was focused on ownership transformation via foreign participation and stock listing employing data of 14 listed chinese banks during the period 1999 2008 this paper tests whether ipo was an effective way to enhance banks efficiency using two frontier approaches data envelopment analysis and sfa the results confirm our hypothesis and suggest that restructuring banks into shareholding companies improves both technical efficiency and scale economies this conclusion is further confirmed by the technical inefficiency effects model which found that efficiency rating of listed banks was about 5 per cent higher than their prior ipo level facing tougher economic condition and increased competition banks not only need to broaden income sources cut expenditures but more importantly to strengthen their risk management to become more resistant to a volatile business environment

growth and convergence of the oecd countries a multi sector production frontier approach abstract kumar and russell 2002 henderson and russell 2005 and badunenko henderson and russell 2013 have proposed a production frontier methodology to analyze the economic growth and the convergence of growth rates across countries they see two main advantages to this methodology 1 it reconstructs the world production frontier without relying on any particular typically unverifiable assumptions on any aspects of the growth process and 2 it allows to decompose labor productivity growth into several parts in this paper i extend the previous approach by considering a multi sector setting this setting allows to propose a more realistic and complete country level analysis while keeping the same advantages as with the previous methodology i also tackle the criticism of less reliable data at the sector level than at the country level by showing how the multi sector approach can easily be adapted i apply it to the oecd countries from 1995 to 2008 the results confirm the non neutrality of technological change i also find that capital accumulation plays the biggest role in the increase of output labor productivity while technological change and human capital accumulation also play an important role but it is twice as small as capital accumulation interestingly these results suggest the emergence of two groups eastern and central european countries and the eu15 and korea the two groups seem to diverge over time

environmental efficiency and economic growth of china a ray slack based model analysis abstract the chinese economy has been experiencing rapid growth since the implementation of the reform and opening up policy however at the same time it faces issues regarding resource savings and environmental protection which are important aspects of the new industrialization therefore this study conducts data envelopment analysis dea to evaluate the environmental efficiency of chinese regions certain existing dea models account for undesirable outputs and do not elucidate the weak disposable relationship between undesirable and desirable outputs thus polar theory is introduced among the dea modeling in this study first drawing on stochastic frontier analysis ray stochastic frontier analysis and dea we propose a ray slack based model rsbm to evaluate provincial environmental efficiencies in china from 2004 to 2012 subsequently an rsbm malmquist luenberger total factor productivity index is structured finally economic growth environmental efficiency and energy consumption are analyzed using spatial panel econometrics as this study treats industrial waste as undesirable outputs the rsbm results show that the environmental efficiencies in the east are the highest while those in the central regions are the lowest the spatial econometric analysis reveals that the ratios of direct to total elasticity and those of direct to total effect for capital labor and energy input variables are fixed furthermore the study provides policy implications and suggestions for future research

determinants of off farm work and its effects on farm performance the case of norwegian grain farmers limited attention has been given in the literature to the impact of off farm work on farm performance more knowledge about the determinants of part time farming and its effects on farm performance could help policymakers to introduce better targeted rural development policies the aim in this article is to fill part of the above mentioned gaps by analyzing factors that influence the choices of off farm work by either the farmer alone or jointly by both the farmer and partner and simultaneously examining how off farm work influences farm performance these analyses were based on an unbalanced panel data set from norwegian grain farms during 1991 to 2005 among the determinants of off farm work hours we found that in addition to demographic time trend and some regional effects there was a significant negative effect of farm output on farmers off farm work hours the production function results revealed that off farm work had a positive effect on farm output at first increasing but then decreasing with increase in hours spent in off farm work furthermore our analysis revealed no systematic effect of off farm work on farm technical efficiency

organisational and spatial determinants of the multi unit firm evidence from the french industry galliano d and soulie n organizational and spatial determinants of the multi unit firm evidence from french industry regional studies this article aims to analyse the factors internal characteristics spatial and industrial environments that determine the existence of multi unit firms and the intensity of their organizational fragmentation at a national scale the empirical models are based on individual data on all french industrial firms collected by the french national institute of statistics the results show the importance of internal characteristics scale economies specific assets as research and development and advertising skill level etc in organizational choice they also highlight the major role played by multi location and by the spatial profile of the firms on the intensity of their fragmentation galliano d and soulie n

technical change and total factor productivity growth for swedish manufacturing and service industries this paper presents alternative specifications of the production functions of a large panel of swedish firms for the period 1992 2000 the period can be characterized as a transition when long run productivity growth in the swedish economy improved from being among the weakest to one of the strongest within the oecd in order to present a detailed exploration of this dramatic change the time trend and general index models are applied to estimate total factor productivity tfp growth rate of technical change and returns to scale the models are extended to allow for firm specific as well as time varying technical change the parametric tfp measures are also compared with the non parametric solow residual and several hypotheses are tested to explain the growth patterns in the swedish economy it is found that the improved growth rate initially starting in large exporting manufacturing firms after a deep economic crisis at the beginning of the 1990s spilled over to the rest of the economy both manufacturing and services

a causal model of linkages among environmental dimensions macro organizational characteristics and performance an integrative model of relationships among environmental dimensions diversification strategy firm size structural divisionalization and economic performance was developed and tested using environmental and organizational data from 110 large manufacturing firms the results suggested that among those organizations 1 higher levels of environmental instability were associated with lower levels of divisionalization and diversification 2 strategy followed structure and 3 size did not mediate the strategy structure relationship furthermore both environmental instability and diversification were positively related to market determined performance and instability was negatively related to operating performance the results provided support for portions of each of three models the external control strategic management and inertial models

productivity across industries and countries time series theory and evidence the authors examine whether convergence in aggregate productivity is also occurring at the industry level in fourteen oecd countries from 1970 to 1987 using both cross section and time series methods they find convergence in some sectors such as services however surprisingly the authors find that convergence does not hold for the manufacturing sector decomposing aggregate convergence into industry productivity gains and changing sectoral shares of output they find the service sector to be responsible for the bulk of cross country convergence to the united states the authors develop a new result on the asymptotic normality of panel unit root estimators to formally test within sector convergence copyright 1996 by mit press

does taking the shadow economy into account matter when measuring aggregate efficiency we analyze how adding the shadow economy to official output figures affects estimated technical efficiency at the country level we find that this only slightly affects the ranking of efficiency scores but increases average efficiency in a sample of 87 to 97 countries both developed and developing our results are robust to the functional form of the production technology and the adjustment of labour to account for years of schooling

bank productivity and performance groups a decomposition approach based upon the luenberger productivity indicator abstract the purpose of this paper is twofold first in the framework of the strategic groups literature it analyzes changes in productivity and efficiency of spanish private and savings banks over an eight year period 1998 2006 second by adapting the decomposition of the malmquist productivity indices suggested by fare et al 1994 it proposes similar components decomposing the luenberger productivity indicator initially productivity is decomposed into technological and efficiency changes thereafter this efficiency change is decomposed into pure efficiency scale and congestion changes empirical results demonstrate that productivity improvements are partially due to technological innovation furthermore it is shown how the competition between private and savings banks develops in terms of the analyzed productivity and efficiency components while private banks enjoy better efficiency change savings banks contribute more to technological progress consequently the luenberger components are used as cluster analysis inputs thus economic interpretations of the resulting performance groups are made via key differences in productivity components finally following the strategic groups literature supplementary insights are gained by linking these performance groups with banking ratios

public capital and total factor productivity new evidence from the italian regions 1970 98 destefanis s and sena v 2005 public capital and total factor productivity new evidence from the italian regions 1970 98 regional studies 39 603 618 this paper analyses the relationship between industrial total factor productivity and public capital across the 20 italian administrative regions it adds upon the existing literature in a number of ways it analyses a longer period 1970 98 it allows for the role of human capital accumulation it tests for the existence of a long run relationship between total factor productivity and public capital through previously suggested panel techniques and for weak exogeneity of public capital and it assesses the significance of public capital within a non parametric set up based on the free disposal hull the results confirm that public capital has a significant impact on the evolution of total factor productivity particularly in the southern regions this impact is mainly ascribed to the core infrastructures road and airports harbours railroads w

the specification of the aggregate production function in the presence of inefficiency abstract in this paper we consider the impact of the specification of production technology on technical efficiency we reject the cobb douglas specification of aggregate production in favour of a more general translog form however the effect of functional form on the measured efficiency terms is actually quite small both of these results are robust to the adjustment of labour to account for years of schooling

dynamic environmental performance analysis a malmquist index approach abstract this article presents a general framework for dynamic environmental performance analysis by generalizing the approach proposed by kuosmanen and kortelainen kuosmanen t kortelainen m 2005 measuring eco efficiency of production with data envelopment analysis journal of industrial ecology 9 4 59 72 from a static to a dynamic setting for this purpose we construct an environmental performance index epi by applying frontier efficiency techniques and a malmquist index approach compared to other dynamic environmental productivity and efficiency analysis approaches based on these methods our approach builds on the standard definition of eco efficiency as it is presented in the ecological economics literature recognizing the importance to analyze the sources of environmental performance changes we show how changes in overall environmental performance can be decomposed into changes in relative eco efficiency and shifts in environmental technology respectively we apply the presented technique at the macro level to dynamic environmental performance analysis of 20 member states of the european union in 1990 2003 according to the results environmental technical change mostly explains the improvement in overall environmental performance while relative eco efficiency change has been minor for most countries during the sample period

organizational capabilities and the economic history of the industrial enterprise in my book scale and scope 1990 i focused on the history of the modern industrial firm from the 1880s when such firms first appeared through world war ii i did so by comparing the fortunes of more than 600 enterprises the 200 largest industrial firms at three points in time world war i 1929 and world war ii in each of the three major industrial economies those of the united states britain and germany in this paper i first describe the similarities in the historical beginnings and continuing evolution of these enterprises and then outline my explanation for these similarities next i relate my explanation of these empirical regularities to four major economic theories relating to the firm the neoclassical the principal agent the transaction cost and the evolutionary finally i suggest the value of the transactions cost and evolutionary theories to historians and economists who are attempting to explain the beginnings and growth of modern industrial enterprises

human capital and convergence a production frontier approach using nonparametric production frontier methods we decompose labor productivity growth into components attributable to technological change shifts in the world production frontier technological catch up movements toward or away from the frontier and physical and human capital accumulation movements along the frontier we find that 1 technological change is decidedly nonneutral 2 productivity growth is driven primarily by physical and human capital accumulation 3 the increased international dispersion of productivity is explained primarily by physical capital accumulation and 4 international polarization the shift from a unimodal to a bimodal distribution is brought about primarily by efficiency changes technological catch up

technical change and the von neumann coefficient of uniform expansion abstract we study technical change for multi product technologies to examine its effect on economic growth for 27 oecd organization for economic cooperation and development countries during 1951 2014 we review the malmquist index and reexamine von neumann s model of an expanding economy we estimate the coefficient of uniform expansion via dea data envelopment analysis and use it to measure technical change via a solow residual and an alternative von neumann technical change index which equals the difference between the growth rates of the slowest growing output and the fastest growing input we also exploit a property of constant returns to scale in order to examine technical change of the average technology during 2005 2014 the solow residual shows relatively fast technical change in contrast the malmquist average technology and alternative von neumann technical change indexes show negative or stagnant technical change