Industry Mix, Plant Turnover and Productivity Growth: A Case Study of the Electronic and Electrical Product Manufacturing

Kelvin Chan, Wulong Gu and Jianmin Tang

Transnational Corporations Review, 2012, vol. 4, issue 1, 11-37

Abstract: Labor productivity growth in the Canadian electronic and electrical product manufacturing industry declined, from 21% per year in the period 1997-2000, to negative 4% per year in the period 2000-2006. This paper investigates if the restructuring and the reallocation of market share and resource within the industry following the bursting of the tech bubble in 2000 contributed to the slowdown in productivity growth. The reallocation may be a result of change in the composition of constituent sub-industries (industry mix), the entry of new firms and the exit of existing firms, and/or the growth and decline in continuing firms. This paper discusses that the slowdown in productivity growth in the Canadian electronic and electrical product industry was mainly due to weaker productivity performance of the sub-industries, which can largely be traced to the decline in labor productivity growth of continuing plants. It finds that the reallocation had some impact, but it was not the primary factor behind the decline. Finally, the paper argues that even if the Canadian industry mix were the same as the U.S. industry mix over this period, the productivity growth profile of the Canadian electronic and electrical product manufacturing industry would not change.

Keywords: Industry mix; plant turnover; productivity growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://tnc-online.net/journal/html/?340.html (text/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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oul:tncr09:v:4:y:2012:i:1:p:11-37

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Transnational Corporations Review from Ottawa United Learning Academy 1568 Merivale Rd. Suite # 618, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K2G 5Y7.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Denny Liao ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ) and Jen Ma ().