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In my post last week on The Treasury’s recent note on productivity, I highlighted that the weak labour productivity growth evident in New Zealand over the last decade wasn’t something we’d shared with the OECD countries that were around our level of average productivity. This chart was from that post. But as I also noted, … Continue reading Productivity growth: 4 Anglos

This article analyzes productivity growth for European banks over the 1995–2001 period. In contrast to previous literature, the study encompasses the overwhelming majority of current European Union (EU) countries—all excepting Greece and those joining the EU in 2004. In addition, we use resampling methods so as to gain statistical precision, which turns out to be especially important due to the limitations of the database. In a second stage, additional nonparametric methods—in an attempt to be fully consistent—are used to disentangle some reasons as to why productivity differentials might exist. Results show that productivity growth has occurred in most countries, mainly due to improvement in production possibilities. The bootstrap analysis yields further evidence, as for many firms and countries productivity growth, or decline, is not statistically significant. The two-stage analysis provides some additional insights, suggesting that the relevance of environmental variables found in other studies focusing on efficiency could be lessened when focusing on productivity.

The case of Indian agricultural performance was impressive. The food production and increases in productivity are essential for meeting the growing demands for food in the future. There is widespread opinion that this growing demand can be met by increased use of inputs or increases in agricultural productivity. Productivity growth of agriculture in India over the past four decades was the result of a combination of factors such as new incentives to farmers offered by the government who considered them as autonomous economic agents, and physical factors such as land, labour, capital (in the form of machines, working animals, irrigation system, and so on), and intermediate inputs such as fertilizer. Indian agricultural growth has been less dependent on the conventional inputs of capital. Capital was computed as the sum of the value of agricultural machinery, farm equipment and tools, transport equipment in farm business, land improvements, investments in private and public irrigation, and farm houses in Indian agriculture. As the growth of agriculture increases the importance of conventional inputs of capital becomes lesser in comparison to modern inputs of capital. Since mid 1960s, a package of modern inputs of capital such as high yield variety seeds, chemical fertilizers, tractor etc. has been continuously used with increasing trend in Indian agriculture. This was main cause of the remarkable growth in output of agriculture during 1970s and 1980s decades. This paper is aimed at analyzing the impact of some production variables (input) on agricultural productivity growth (output) in Indian agriculture from 1969-70 to 2005-06. The question here is whether or not these different variables have an impact on agricultural production.

Now, of course, this is a boss complaining that the bureaucracy won't allow him to do what he wants to do: The UK competition regulator is stifling innovation and entrepreneurship by taking too long to make decisions, according to a senior Adobe executive who is overseeing its $20 billion takeover of Figma.In an interview with The Times, David Wadhwani, president of Adobe's Digital Media business, said: "The process should not take 15 months to get to this stage. I think we can all agree that expediting these kinds of decisions is important for innovation and for doing the right thing by consumers and customers to make these decisions faster and move more quickly."In November, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it was minded to block Adobe's multibillion-dollar takeover of the app interface design business Figma because it could harm competition in product design, image editing and illustration. A final decision will be made by the end of February next year.We're even prepared to accept, for the moment and for this argument only, that the concerns of the CMA are valid. Maybe it will cause problems in some corner of this market. You know, maybe.But now the point we've made before. There are two types of economic growth, there's simply processing more economic resources into more output. Not very green, it's also how all of the Soviet Union's growth turned up. More iron ore and coal to make the steel for the machines to dig up more iron ore and coal. There's also becoming more efficient at our use of economic resources. This is what produced about 80% of the economic growth in the market economies in that long 20th century. Becoming more efficient is also known as increasing productivity. We can talk about total factor productivity (how efficient we become at using everything) or the one that politics currently whines about, labour productivity. How much more value do we gain from an hour of human labour? This productivity increase - it comes from either doing new things, or doing old things in new ways. As above, this has historically been 80% of total growth. The speed of GDP growth is the speed at which we do those new things or things the new way. This is also the same, in concept, as the speed of productivity growth.So, now we've a bureaucracy taking 15 months to even decide whether they might have a concern about someone suggesting a new arrangement for doing something or other. Sure, that new thing might be bad. Might be good too. But at some rate of bureaucratic cogitation the time spent to think through it causes as much damage to economic and productivity growth as simply allowing a bad thing to happen.We're not getting richer precisely and exactly because we've a bureaucracy deciding how we should be getting richer. The answer is obvious - simply abolish the Competition and Markets Authority. Replace it, perhaps, with something efficient, that doesn't, by definition, make us poorer. Or a coin toss, likely to do less harm.Given that example we have of a sensible political reaction to bureaucracy in Argentina, so, where's that chainsaw gone?

Abstract. This paper introduces a new technique for measuring productivity growth and applies it to a sample of APEC countries. The technique is based on a version of Luenberger's shortage function which generalizes Shephard's input and output distance functions.

By the end of 2007, Chile's total factor productivity was lower than ten years earlier, a performance that contrasted sharply with the previous decade, when productivity grew by a cumulative 30 percent. This paper assesses productivity trends in Chile, by decomposing productivity into investment-specific technological change (associated with improvements in the quality of capital) and neutral technological change (related to the organization of productive activities). It concludes that investment-specific technological improvements have contributed significantly to long-term growth in Chile, i