The existing evidence for the effects of agricultural technological change on cropland use is inadequate to clarify the polarized views on whether encouraging technological progress would slow down the expansion of croplands into forests. This article seeks to inform these views by developing and estimating a model that links the changes in a country’s cropland to the changes in both domestic a...

The 1990s have been a decade of minimal growth for the Japanese economy. Examining this record from a growth accounting perspective, this paper argues that a major factor underlying Japan’s disappointing growth performance in recent years has been a marked slow-down in total factor productivity (TFP) growth. It is suggested that, given present population trends and low returns on capital, any s...

investing in research and development spending (r&d) affects total factor productivity (tfp).recently new theories of economic growth have emphasized the relationship between r&d and tfpand also identified a number of channels through which a country’s r&d affects tfp of its tradepartner. this study seeks to estimate the effect of agricultural r&d and education spending and some...

This paper identifies a new source of business-cycle fluctuations. Namely, a common stochastic trend in neutral and investment-specific productivity. We document that in U.S. postwar quarterly data total factor productivity (TFP) and the relative price of investment are cointegrated. We show theoretically that TFP and the relative price of investment are cointegrated if and only if neutral and ...

The recent productivity experience of the New Zealand economy is examined using a cyclically-adjusted or trend measure of total factor productivity (TFP). On the basis of this measure, the results of estimating a leader-follower convergence relationship suggest that productivity in New Zealand has been converging to US levels through a process of technological diffusion. The evidence also tenta...

This paper develops a model in which measured total factor productivity (TFP) is endogenously determined, in order to quantitatively explain the following three facts of the Japanese growth miracle between 1956 and 1973. First, the growth rate of GDP per unit of labor in the second half of this period was 7.9 percent while in the first half it was only 5.5 percent. Second, the rate of return to...

This paper presents an updated estimation of the total factor productivity (TFP) of the U.S. economy following the two preceding empirical studies, Basu et al. (2001) and Burnside et al. (1995). Based on these two estimation approaches, both of which carefully handle the potential estimation bias stemming from cyclical utilization, we veriÞed that the TFP growth in the late 90s was, to some ext...

In this paper we aim to measure and to explain the frontier total factor productivity (TFP) growth in Tunisia over the period 1983-1996. We do not measure TFP growth by the conventional Solow residual. Instead we define TFP growth as the shift of the economy's production frontier, which we obtain year by year by solving a linear program, a sort of aggregate DEA analysis. We then decompose this ...