Cross-Country Productivity Comparisons: The "Revealed Superiority" Approach

Ziv Bar-Shira (), Israel Finkelshtain () and Avi Simhon

Journal of Economic Growth, 2003, vol. 8, issue 3, 23 pages

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel non-parametric methodology for comparing total factor productivity (TFP) across countries and over time. It develops the principle of revealed superiority along the lines of Samuelson's principle of revealed preferences. Specifically, we compare the aggregate actual profits in each country to the hypothetical profits it would have earned if, facing its own prices, it had employed another country's inputs and produced its output. We show that our procedure reveals the "true" TFP ranking under relatively mild assumptions. We apply our method by ranking a panel of the 25 richest economies relative to one another and over time and find that the United States enjoys the highest TFP whereas Singapore has the lowest. Copyright 2003 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://journals.kluweronline.com/issn/1381-4338/contents link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jecgro:v:8:y:2003:i:3:p:301-23

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... th/journal/10887/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Growth is currently edited by Oded Galor

More articles in Journal of Economic Growth from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().