An international comparison of productivity change in the textile and clothing industry: a bootstrapped Malmquist index approach

Magdalena Kapelko and Alfons Oude Lansink ()

Empirical Economics, 2015, vol. 48, issue 4, 1499-1523

Abstract: Firms in the textile and clothing industry operate in competitive international markets characterized by the liberalized trade after the removal of multi-fiber agreement quotas in 2005, and have to address rapid changes in consumer preferences and production technology. Hence, improving competitiveness is crucial for firm survival. Competitiveness of the sector often depends on its firms meeting their production potential. This paper analyzes productivity changes in the textile and clothing industry worldwide during the period 1995–2004. A bootstrapped Malmquist approach is used to identify the respective contributions of technical change, technical efficiency change, and scale efficiency change. Moreover, differences in productivity changes across different groups of firms are statistically assessed. Our results show a relatively small overall productivity increase for both textile and clothing firms due to positive technical change, despite declines in technical and scale efficiency. Furthermore, our results indicate that productivity and its components differ for textile firms and clothing firms, for firms in countries that benefited and did not benefit from the quotas’ elimination, and for firms in different regions. Copyright The Author(s) 2015

Keywords: Data envelopment analysis; Malmquist index; Bootstrap; Textile; Clothing industry; C61; D24; L67; O33; P52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00181-014-0835-5 (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:spr:empeco:v:48:y:2015:i:4:p:1499-1523

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... rics/journal/181/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00181-014-0835-5

Access Statistics for this article

Empirical Economics is currently edited by Robert M. Kunst, Arthur H.O. van Soest, Bertrand Candelon, Subal C. Kumbhakar and Joakim Westerlund

More articles in Empirical Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().