scholarly journals PRODUCTIVITY DYNAMICS OF CHINESE MANUFACTURING FIRMS

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (04) ◽  
pp. 899-919
Author(s):  
QU FENG ◽  
ZHIFENG WANG ◽  
GUIYING LAURA WU

China has experienced high-speed catch-up growth with an average annual rate of over 8% in per capita GDP in the past four decades. Using growth accounting, Zhu (Understanding China’s growth: Past, present, and future. Journal of Economics Perspectives, 26(4), 103–124) finds that the growth of total factor productivity (TFP) accounts for 77% of China’s per capita GDP growth during 1978–2007, and argues that China’s TFP growth is mainly driven by resource reallocation due to market liberalization and institutional reforms. This paper aims to estimate China’s aggregate productivity growth by applying three leading methods of estimating firm-level production function on Chinese manufacturing firms during 1998–2007, and quantify the contribution of resource reallocation to productivity growth. In addition, we also empirically compare the three estimation methods in this large data set.

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-289
Author(s):  
Eduard J. Alvarez-Palau ◽  
Alfonso Díez-Minguela ◽  
Jordi Martí-Henneberg

AbstractThis study explores the relationship between railroad integration and regional development on the European periphery between 1870 and 1910, based on a regional data set including 291 spatial units. Railroad integration is proxied by railroad density, while per capita GDP is used as an indicator of economic development. The period under study is of particular relevance as it has been associated with the second wave of railroad construction in Europe and also coincides with the industrialization of most of the continent. Overall, we found that railroads had a significant and positive impact on the growth of per capita GDP across Europe. The magnitude of this relationship appears to be relatively modest, but the results obtained are robust with respect to a number of different specifications. From a geographical perspective, we found that railroads had a significantly greater influence on regions located in countries on the northern periphery of Europe than in other outlying areas. They also helped the economies of these areas to begin the process of catching up with the continent’s industrialized core. In contrast, the regions on the southern periphery showed lower levels of economic growth, with this exacerbating the preexisting divergence in economic development. The expansion of the railroad network in them was unable to homogenize the diffusion of economic development and tended to further benefit the regions that were already industrialized. In most of the cases, the capital effect was magnified, and this contributed to the consolidation of newly created nation-states.


2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Mukherjee

The article studies the impact of outsourcing services on the productivity growth of the Indian manufacturing firms. By the term services we mean different expenses on services incurred by the manufacturing firms, such as, advertising, marketing, research and development, consultancy, auditing, business services, knowledge-based services, technical, legal and other professional services (including information communication and technology services). With further expansion in newer services, a higher demand has come from the Indian manufacturing sector. With intensive usage of services in the manufacturing production process, the performance and the manufacturing can focus on the core competencies with outsourced and cheaper services from expert service provider. For this purpose, the firm-level data have been collected from the annual financial statements of the Centre for Monitoring of the Indian Economy’s Prowess database. The econometric results conclude that services have played a positive role in improving the productivity growth of the aggregate Indian manufacturing firms and at the disaggregated level, especially for industrial groups such as food, beverage and tobacco; textiles, gems and jewellery; transport; machinery; metal, rubber and plastic; leather and footwear; and chemicals, services have played a favourable role in boosting the productivity growth. JEL: D24, L80, L60


Author(s):  
Alexandre Rands Barros

The Brazilian Northeast is a large poor region, which was the first to be colonized in Brazil. The region experienced some dynamism as a result of its early role as a centre of the agricultural export economy. However, historical and political circumstances resulted in a society in which there was a successive failure to build up the level of human capital level in the region. In particular, low access to political power of disadvantaged social groups prevented the implementation of an inclusive educational policy. This generated low per capita GDP and productivity growth, when compared to the national average. The prospects that some convergence with the national average will occur are only partial and restricted.


Endocrinology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 160 (10) ◽  
pp. 2395-2400 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J Handelsman ◽  
Lam P Ly

Abstract Hormone assay results below the assay detection limit (DL) can introduce bias into quantitative analysis. Although complex maximum likelihood estimation methods exist, they are not widely used, whereas simple substitution methods are often used ad hoc to replace the undetectable (UD) results with numeric values to facilitate data analysis with the full data set. However, the bias of substitution methods for steroid measurements is not reported. Using a large data set (n = 2896) of serum testosterone (T), DHT, estradiol (E2) concentrations from healthy men, we created modified data sets with increasing proportions of UD samples (≤40%) to which we applied five different substitution methods (deleting UD samples as missing and substituting UD sample with DL, DL/√2, DL/2, or 0) to calculate univariate descriptive statistics (mean, SD) or bivariate correlations. For all three steroids and for univariate as well as bivariate statistics, bias increased progressively with increasing proportion of UD samples. Bias was worst when UD samples were deleted or substituted with 0 and least when UD samples were substituted with DL/√2, whereas the other methods (DL or DL/2) displayed intermediate bias. Similar findings were replicated in randomly drawn small subsets of 25, 50, and 100. Hence, we propose that in steroid hormone data with ≤40% UD samples, substituting UD with DL/√2 is a simple, versatile, and reasonably accurate method to minimize left censoring bias, allowing for data analysis with the full data set.


Author(s):  
Admasu Shiferaw ◽  
Måns Söderbom

Over the last two decades the Ethiopian manufacturing sector has experienced rapid expansion in terms of the number of firms, sales, and employment. This chapter examines the performance of the manufacturing sector using aggregate data and firm-level panel data compiled by the Central Statistical Agency (CSA) of Ethiopia. The focus is on three dimensions of performance: productivity growth, the extent of export orientation, and the competitiveness of domestic firms in the global context. Manufacturing remains a relatively small sector in terms of contribution to GDP and employment, and it has yet to become export oriented even by African standards. In examining productivity growth, the analysis addresses within-firm productivity growth and its heterogeneity across firms, as well as the role of resource reallocation from less efficient firms to more efficient ones.


2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-155
Author(s):  
Chih-Hai Yang ◽  
Chia-Hui Huang

Innovation is widely recognized as the main stimulus of economic growth. Considering that Taiwan has devoted increasingly more efforts to R&D since the late 1980s, a crucial question is posed: did the R&D productivity of firms begin to decline in Taiwan during the post-Asian Financial Crisis period when Taiwan's economic growth began to decelerate? This study investigates changes in R&D productivity for Taiwan's manufacturing firms from 1990 to 2003. By employing various approaches to obtain robust results, findings from firm-level microeconometric analysis suggests that overall R&D productivity in Taiwan appears to have been ascendant, particularly during the post-crisis period. This result is also evidenced by segmenting the sample into industry groups, whereby electronics firms have a significantly high R&D productivity growth relative to firms outside the electronics industry. Therefore, the slowdown of Taiwan's economic growth in the past decade is attributed to other influences rather than a slowdown in R&D productivity.


2021 ◽  
pp. 097215092110564
Author(s):  
Abdul Rashid ◽  
Afaq Khan ◽  
Ahmad Fraz

This article empirically scrutinizes the effect of exchange rate changes, exchange rate uncertainty and firm leverage on firm-level productivity growth. It also examines the differential effects of these variables, conditional on the levels of exports. Finally, it investigates whether a firm’s heterogeneity in terms of its share of exports in total sales matters in determining the response of a firm’s productivity growth to these variables. The empirical analysis is based on an unbalanced panel data set with annual observations of 222 exporting firms listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange over the 2009–2017 period. We find that both exchange rate changes and exchange rate uncertainty have significant, negative effects on the firm’s productivity growth, and exporting further makes intense these effects. Yet, we show that export activities are positively related to firms’ productivity growth. We also reveal that there is a significant heterogeneity in the effects of exchange rate changes, its uncertainty and leverage, which is attributed to export intensity. Specifically, we observe that the effects are more prominent in firms that export more shares of their output to foreign markets.


2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-620 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hui-Lin Lin ◽  
Yi-Chi Hsiao ◽  
Eric S. Lin

Based on different motivations for engaging in outward FDI, this study divides firms' outward FDI into five types: non-FDI, FDI, defensive only outward FDI, expansive only outward FDI, and both defensive & expansive outward FDI simultaneously, and proposes four hypotheses to evaluate their relative strength in terms of firm productivity and innovation capability. The propensity score matching estimator based on a uniquely compiled Taiwanese manufacturing data set shows that, as firms engage in outward FDI, they have higher productivity growth rates compared to non-FDI firms. As for the further disengagement of the impacts of outward FDI, our empirical results indicate that expansive outward FDI tends to strengthen firms' productivity growth, while such a growth-boosting effect is not statistically significant for defensive outward FDI. Moreover, as far as firms undertaking defensive & expansive outward FDI simultaneously are concerned, we also find a positive and significant impact of outward FDI on productivity growth, but the effect is not as large as that for firms engaging solely in expansive outward FDI. This may imply that defensive outward FDI has some adverse effects on firms' productivity growth. As firm performance is measured by innovation growth, the average treatment effects are all significantly positive regardless of the type of outward FDI strategies. Nevertheless, engaging in defensive outward FDI is less advantageous to innovation growth than the expansionary outward FDI, as well as to defensive & expansive outward FDI simultaneously.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 54
Author(s):  
Rakhi Singh ◽  
Seema Sharma ◽  
Deepak Tandon

Indian economy is one of the fastest growing economies in the world today. In line with global trade trends, Indian export sector has been growing and contributing significantly to the economy. Given its exports structure, India is well positioned to benefit from the structural changes in technology and emerging forces of globalization. Indian economy has shown remarkable progress in terms of foreign trade after the introduction of economic reforms in 1991. The European Union (EU) is a very important trading partner of India. The trade volumes between India and EU have shown remarkable improvement in last one and a half decade. After starting out at a relatively low level in the 1990’s, the trade volumes, both with respect to Indian exports to the EU as well as with respect to Indian imports from the EU, started to increase most noticeably after the year 2001.Use of non-tariff measures (NTMs) as means of protection has captured a lot of focus after reduction of tariffs in the world trade. India even after being a strategic partner for European Union (EU) has to face lot of NTMs on its exports. Based on studies in the past, link between the incidence of NTMs imposed by the home country and the income level of the foreign country has been established. The interplay of incidence of NTMs and the GDP remains largely unexplored in the context of India-EU trade relationship. This paper tries to fill this gap and show the importance of the study in policy decisions. Authors have used UNCTAD’s NTM data and Spearman’s correlation coefficient to measure the strength and direction of the relationship between incidence of NTM with per capita GDP of the exporting country (India). The authors have used different permutations of data from the main data set (1994-95 to 2016-17) for analysis and have concluded that incidence of NTMs on Indian exports to EU is positively co-related to the per capita GDP of India.


Author(s):  
Sarah Reichwein ◽  
Stanley E. Jones

In an earlier paper, the authors extended the small parameter analysis of the classic Tate Equations presented by Walters, et al and to the modified penetration equations introduced previously by Jones, et al. The purpose of this extension was to provide an explicit solution to a complex system of nonlinear penetration equations in which penetrator mushrooming was considered, as well as erosion. This has a dramatic effect on the prediction of penetration depth for reasonable values of the strength parameters in the problem. The results were very encouraging and led to our increased understanding of the penetration process. In this paper, we further modify the equations for penetration depth by replacing the fundamental kinematical length relation, considered earlier, by one which was introduced by Wilson, et al. This change does not complicate the system because the mushroom strain is constant, but it does produce some significant changes. In this paper, the results of Cinnamon, et al are used to estimate the mushroom strain. However, instead of applying this result directly, we employ an averaging process to accommodate deviations from cylindrical crater geometry. The changes result in improved penetration depth estimates in high speed metal on metal impacts. A large data set is analyzed using the new results. Application to heavy metal impacts against armor targets is considered as an example.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document