Productivity Trends in India's Manufacturing Sectors in the Last Two Decades

Bulent Unel ()

No 2003/022, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: Starting in the late 1970s, the Indian authorities implemented a series of reforms aimed at exposing the economy to greater competition and at liberalizing key aspects of economic activity. This paper investigates productivity trends in India's (registered) manufacturing sectors during the 1980s and 1990s. The main findings of the paper are (i) labor and total factor productivity (TFP) growth in total manufacturing and many of the component sectors since 1980 were markedly higher than that in the preceding two decades, although the extent of the acceleration in TFP growth depends critically on the underlying assumptions about factor elasticities and the assumed structure of the production function; (ii) productivity growth for total manufacturing as well as for many subsectors picked up further after the 1991 reforms; and (iii) classification of the best performing sectors and the weakest performing sectors, based on comparative TFP, remains robust to changes in underlying assumptions.

Keywords: WP; productivity trend; growth rate; Labor productivity; factor productivity; productivity performance; productivity analysis; productivity literature; TFP contribution; productivity change; Productivity; Total factor productivity; Manufacturing; Capital productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25
Date: 2003-01-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (55)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=16254 (application/pdf)

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:imf:imfwpa:2003/022

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/pubs/ord_info.htm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Akshay Modi ().