Country-level Business Performance and Policy Asymmetries in Great Britain

Don Webber (), Don Webber, Martin Boddy () and John Hudson
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Don Webber: School of Economics, University of the West of England
Martin Boddy: Faculty of the Built Environment, University of the West of England

No 611, Working Papers from Department of Accounting, Economics and Finance, Bristol Business School, University of the West of England, Bristol

Abstract: The HM Treasury identifies key ‘drivers’ of business performance and productivity differentials, which include skills, investment and competition. This paper presents an empirical investigation into the effects of these drivers on business-level productivity per employee across England, Scotland and Wales in order to identify whether spatial differences in the influence of these drivers exist. We adopt the Cobb-Douglas production function approach and our results suggest that, after taking account of sector specific effects, productivity differentials do exist between businesses across Great Britain and that policy instruments do potentially enhance productivity. The results indicate that these key drivers are equally applicable across countries of Great Britain. However, there is evidence to suggest that scale effects for labour and capital do differ across England, Wales and Scotland and that policy makers should be aware of these asymmetries.

Keywords: Productivity per employee; HM Treasury’s key drivers; scale effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 R38 R58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 11 pages
Date: 2006-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff and nep-geo
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http://carecon.org.uk/DPs/0611.pdf First version, 2006 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:uwe:wpaper:0611

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