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Productivity growth in the industrial sector has come to be identified as a key factor in the structural formation of the developing countries. The paper employs the production function framework to study productivity growth and technical efficiency in thirty important industries in Bangladesh using the CMI (Census of manufacturing Industries) data for individual firms for the years 1974/75, 1975/76; 1979/80 to 1985/86. (DÜI-Sen)

This paper presents estimates of indexes of internal returns to scale and external economies for two‐digit manufacturing industries in Taiwan. Estimating the returns to scale indexes involves using both SUR and 3SLS estimation procedures. The data strongly support the presence of external increasing returns to scale. The findings indicate no evidence of internal increasing return in all two‐digit manufacturing industries. According to the endogenous growth literature, the existence of externalities in production bears important economic implications in some aspects of economic growth, even though the data cannot distinguish the transmission mechanism.

Despite the fact that there are great disparities in factor
endowments, techniques employed in the manufacturing sector of
underdeveloped labour surplus countries are comparable to those of
highly industrialized capital -abundant countries like the United
States. A.R. Khan in his paper on capital intensities and factor use
[13] concluded from an international comparison of factor intensities
that Pakistani capital intensities are near the American level in a
number of industries while in some cases they are even higher.
Explanations of this paradox are based on two different assumptions
regarding the magnitude of the elasticity of substitution between
capital and labour. On the one hand it is assumed that the elasticity of
substitution and thereby the possibility of labour absorption via
changes in factor prices are very limited due to the dominance of
techniques borrowed from the West and oriented to the needs of capital
rich nations. On the other hand, significant substitution possibilities
are assumed in production techniques and the presence of high capital
intensities in the industrial sector is attributed to distortions in the
factor markets in the form of exchange rate regulations, low rates of
bank borrowing, etc., which lead to the price of capital being much
lower than it's social cost.

The choice of technology in the developing countries has been
a subject matter of considerable theoretical and empirical
investigation. That labour-abundant economy like Pakistan should opt for
labour-intensive technology in order to maximise income and employment
has been widely recommended. There has, however, been long-standing
controversy as to whether, and how far, the choice of labour-intensive
technology slows down the rate of growth of income as against the
maximisation of current income by increasing the share of wages in
income which are assumed to be wholly or mostly consumed and by
correspondingly reducing the share of profits which are assumed to add
mainly to the invisible surplus and thus to increase the rate of capital
accumulation. This line of reasoning postulates that a developing
economy has more or less free choice between alternative techniques,
embodying different degrees of labour intensity and has, in addition,
adequate instruments of policy at its disposal to regulate the choice of
technology in the public and private sectors of the economy; it further
seems to imply that it has very inadequate or ineffective instruments of
policy at its disposal to alter the disposition of income between
savings and investment, once the technology and its attendant
distribution of income between wages and profits are given. The
feasibility or the effectiveness of the various fiscal instruments for
increasing the rate of saving in a developing economy has often been
discussed, however, there is very little empirical analysis of the
existing pattern of technology as well as of the limitations on the
choice of technology in a country like Pakistan which imports technology
mainly under foreign aid tied to the purchases in the individual
aid-giving countries which happen to grant loan for individual,
particular capital projects.

Determining factors in plant closings; uses new data on factory closings recorded from 1977-79.