We analyze hospital efficiency and productivity growth using an innovative approach which employs the directional distance function and the Luenberger productivity indicator. The primary advantage of our approach is that both input contractions and output expansions are considered. Our model generates a productivity indicator that is decomposed into the usual constituents of productivity growth...

Detection and identification of the impacts of climate change on ecosystems have been core issues in climate change research in recent years. In this study, we compared average annual values of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) with theoretical net primary productivity (NPP) values based on temperature and precipitation to determine the effect of historic climate change on globa...

this paper is concerned with the estimation of total factor productivity (tfp) growth for the iranian electric utilities during the period 1980-1993 on the basis of panel data. a translog cost function is used which accommodates firm - specific variability through a one - way error component model. the results show that the iranian electricity supply industry experienced increasing returns to s...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the productivity change for agricultural cooperatives in Japan measured by nonparametric outputoriented Malmquist indices of total factor productivity. The productivity change is decomposed into technical change and technical efficiency change. Linear programming techniques are used to calculate the productivity change using a panel data set for 49 agricu...

Essay 1: To replicate an industrial revolution: from exogenous to endogenous growth In the last quarter of the second millennium many countries experienced, simultaneously, an industrial revolution (an exponential increase in the income per capita) and a demographic transition (an increase first and a decrease later of the population growth rate). How do we account for these facts? Following Lu...

One of the earliest and most central insights of the literature on economic development is that development entails structural change. The countries that manage to pull themselves out of poverty and get richer are those that are able to diversify away from agriculture and other traditional products. As labour and other resources move from agriculture into modern economic activities, overall pro...

Constructing total factor productivity growth numbers free of the effects of business cycle variations is, as the large recent literature on the topic has shown, a difficult exercise. But the trend evolutions are clear. In most countries, TFP growth has been lower-often much lower-than it was before the mid-1970s. And the decrease in the underlying TFP growth rate appears to have been quite abr...

This paper analyzes the relationship between investment in information and communication technologies (ICT), non–ICT–investment, labor productivity and workplace reorganization. Firms are assumed to reorganize workplaces if the productivity gains arising from workplace reorganization exceed the associated reorganization costs. Two different types of organizational change are considered: introdu...