This paper analyzes productivity with a directional distance function model by investigating convexity and non-convexity in the Chinese banking sector. Two primary findings are summarized. First, there is a distinct change in productivity between large versus small banks and public versus nationwide joint-stock banks; the economies of scale and public orientation of the Chinese economy affect t...

In this paper, an examination is made of the linkage between foreign direct investment and productivity in eight East Asian economies–China, Hong Kong SAR, Indonesia, Malaysia, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Taiwan Province of China and Thailand. The Granger causality test and the Toda-Yamamoto version of the Granger causality test are used to test if inflows of foreign direct investment “cause”...

The Japanese electricity industry has experienced regulatory reforms since the mid-1990s. This article measures productivity in Japan’s steam power-generation sector and examines the effect of reforms on the productivity of this industry over the period 1978–2003. We estimate the Luenberger productivity indicator, which is a generalization of the commonly used Malmquist productivity index, usin...

Land-use change to meet 21st-century demands for food, fuel, and fiber will depend on many interactive factors, including global policies limiting anthropogenic climate change and realized improvements in agricultural productivity. Climate-change mitigation policies will alter the decision-making environment for land management, and changes in agricultural productivity will influence cultivated...

This study employs non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to obtain the Malmquist total factor productivity index (MPI). The analysis is based on 19 Malaysian banks (domestic and foreign) and the period of study is from 2010 to 2014. The results indicate that the progress or retrogress of 14 Malaysian banks’ efficiency were largely due to scale rather than pure technical efficiency with...

The paper assesses the extent to which sampling variation affects findings about Malmquist productivity change derived using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), in the first stage calculating productivity indices and in the second stage investigating the farm-specific change in productivity. Confidence intervals for Malmquist indices are constructed using Simar and Wilson’s (1999) bootstrapping pr...

Technical progress in U.S. agriculture is evaluated using a new measure of productivity growth, flexible technical change. This measure allows for nonconstant returns to scale, market structures other than perfect competition, and time-varying coefficients. An integral part of the procedure is the estimation of the production function by Flexible Least Squares. Flexible technical change results...

This paper explores a relatively new methodology, the directional distance function method, to analyze productivity growth. The method explicitly evaluates the role undesirable outputs of the economy, such as carbon dioxide and other green-house gases, have on the frontier production process which we specify as a piece-wise linear and convex boundary function. We decompose productivity growth i...