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

G.E. Boyle () and Kieran McQuinn
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G.E. Boyle: Economics Dept, NUI Maynooth

Economics Department Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, National University of Ireland - Maynooth

Abstract: In an important paper. Hal! 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.

Keywords: Productivity; Social Infrastructure; Stochastic Production Frontier. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 D24 O12 O30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 10 pages
Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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