Why do some countries produce so much more output per worker than others? - A note

Gerry Boyle and Kieran McQuinn
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Gerry Boyle: National University of Ireland Maynooth

No 9/RT/04, Research Technical Papers from Central Bank of Ireland

Abstract: In an important paper, Hall and Jones (1999) show that international differences in output per worker across 127 countries in 1988 are fundamentally determined by variations in, what they term, a country's ``social infrastructure''. This paper conducts a robustness check of their findings by implementing a testing framework that is radically different to their approach. Specifically, we estimate a stochastic, rather than a deterministic, production frontier and we also model the potential role of social infrastructure in explaining productivity in a single step, rather than the statistically unsatisfactory two-step method used by Hall and Jones. We obtain two important findings that are strongly supportive of Hall and Jones' results. First, the bulk of inter-country variation in output per worker is accounted for by differences in productivity. Second, social infrastructure is found to be a highly significant variable in explaining inter-country productivity differences.

JEL-codes: O41 O52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 12 pages
Date: 2004-12
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Working Paper: Why do some countries produce so much more output per worker than others? A note (2003)
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