Productivity Growth and R&D Expenditure in Taiwan's Manufacturing Firms

Jiann-Chyuan Wang and Kuen-Hung Tsai

No 9724, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This study sets out to estimate the impact of R&D on productivity within the private sector, with further analysis of the different impacts of R&D in high-tech and conventional firms. The study also aims to estimate the rates of return on R&D investment and total factor productivity at firm level. Based on a sample of 136 large manufacturing firms listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange over the period 1994-2000, our findings suggest that Taiwan's R&D investment had a significant impact on firm productivity growth, with output elasticity standing at around 0.18. When the sample is divided into high-tech and conventional firms, the R&D output elasticity in high-tech firms is significantly greater than that of conventional firms. In addition, the average rate of return in high-tech firms is much larger than that estimated in other industries. Our empirical findings further show that although there was a dramatic decline in TFP in 1998 for all selected industries, this nevertheless started to climb again in 1999.

JEL-codes: L6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-ino and nep-sea
Note: PR
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (35)

Published as Ito, Takatoshi and Andrew K. Rose (eds.) Growth and productivity in East Asia, NBER--East Asia Seminar on Economics, vol. 13. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Published as Productivity Growth and R&D Expenditure in Taiwan's Manufacturing Firms , Jiann-Chyuan Wang, Kuen-Hung Tsai. in Growth and Productivity in East Asia , Ito and Rose. 2004

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9724.pdf (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:nbr:nberwo:9724

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9724

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().