The removal of high levels of protection combined with substantial real devaluations has changed the environment in which Ghanaian manufacturing firms have operated in the 1990s. The changes in output, composition and productivity, which have occurred over this period, are examined in this paper. Survey evidence for the growth of the sector is shown to be consistent with data from sales tax ret...

Globalization has added a powerful new dimension to the link between development and the four dimensions of decent work--basic labour rights and standards, employment, socioeconomic security, and social dialogue. Pre-globalization, the mainstream view was that successful development would clearly imply progress on the two economic dimensions of decent work, namely employment and socioeconomic s...

This paper studies implicit pricing of non-wage job characteristics in the labour market using a two-sided matching model. It departs from the previous literature by allowing worker heterogeneity in productivity, which gives rise to a double transaction problem in a hedonic model. Deriving sufficient conditions under which assortative matching is the unique stable job-worker matching, we show t...

BACKGROUND Well-trained, well-distributed and productive health workers are crucial for access to high-quality, cost-effective healthcare. Because neither a shortage nor a surplus of health workers is wanted, policymakers use workforce planning models to get information on future labour markets and adjust policies accordingly. A neglected topic of workforce planning models is productivity growt...

In the EU, most large firms use e-business applications, such as enterprise resource planning and online procurement. Based on e-business watch data for EU-4 (Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom) we find that the actual use of enterprise resource planning and online procurement is positively correlated with labour productivity growth. Furthermore, we find that certain e-business appli...

We study the earning structure and the equilibrium assignment of workers to firms in a model in which workers have social preferences, and skills are perfectly substitutable in production. Firms offer long-term contracts, and we allow for frictions in the labour market in the form of mobility costs. The model delivers specific predictions about the nature of worker flows, about the characterist...

This paper examines idiosyncrasies of tea plantation culture and politics in relation to Sri Lankan national and popular cultural typologies, with special reference to female tea plantation workers. Tea production in Sri Lanka is heavily based on manual labour, and it is the largest industry that provides accommodation for employees and their families. In this paper, it is argued that politico-...

The paper analyses the relationship between labour productivity, the proportion of older employees and IT intensity in firms. Using firm-level data from German manufacturing and services industries, we find that workers older than 49 are not significantly less productive than prime age workers, whereas workers younger than 30 are significantly less productive than prime age workers. There is no...

In this chapter, we will focus on the determinants of TFP and how to measure it rather than Labour Productivity. The Labour Productivity concept has its uses but the problem with this concept is that LP could be very high in one country compared to another country but the difference could be entirely due to a larger amount of nonlabour input in the first country. On the other hand, if TFP is mu...

This paper performs multiple-break unit root tests on the data of China’s national and sectoral output and labour productivity, with finite-sample critical values bootstrapped through Monte Carlo simulations. We find strong evidence against the unit-root hypothesis in favour of the segmentedtrend-stationarity alternative. Based on breaking trend functions, the steady-state and transitional grow...