The Productivity of Nations

Oleg Badunenko, Daniel Henderson () and Valentin Zelenyuk

No 2017-05, Working Papers in Economics & Finance from University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth Business School, Economics and Finance Subject Group

Abstract: This paper scrutinizes research on the productivity of nations with a particular focus on the preceding 50 years. First, we briefly synopsize ‘classic’ studies on economic growth and convergence of nations. The main criticism of these studies is that they did not account for potential inefficiency of countries. The production frontier literature attempts to deal with this issue and we give a brief introduction to it with a focus on data envelopment analysis. One central point of this review is the analysis of sources of productivity growth before and after 1990, a period of time, which appears to be a point of a structural change in growth patterns around the world. The second thread of this paper concerns the forces behind the transformation of the worldwide productivity distribution from a uni-modal to a bimodal distribution during the 1990s. Finally, we emphasize caveats and outline possible directions for future research.

Keywords: Convergence; Bi-modality; Catching up; Data Envelopment Analysis; Efficiency; Economic Growth; Human capital; Income Distribution; Penn World Tables; Physical capital; Productivity; Stochastic Frontier Analysis; Technology; TFP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 C43 D24 O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42
Date: 2017-05-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-gro, nep-his and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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