Unraveling the Productivity Growth Slowdown in the U.S., Canada and Japan: The Effects of Subequilibrium, Scale Economies and Markup

Catherine J. Morrison Paul ()

No 2993, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Measures of productivity growth typically include in the Productivity "residual" the impacts of subequilibrium from fixity of factors, costs of adjustment, returns to scale and markups. This paper proposes a general two part framework for adjusting the residual measure to take these impacts into account. Errors computing the weights on output and quasi-fixed input growth in traditional measures are first corrected for both primal- and Cost-side measures. Then the deviation of revenues from costs is used to decompose the full primal measure to identify the differential influences of technical change, utilization fluctuations, scale economies and price margins. Use of the framework is illustrated empirically for the U.S.,, Japanese and Canadian manufacturing sectors, using an econometric model that allows explicit incorporation and measurement of these influences. The adjusted measures show that a significant amount of cyclical and secular change in measured productivity growth can be attributed to production characteristics other than technical change, particularly scale economies.

Date: 1989-06
Note: PR
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w2993.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:2993

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w2993
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().