Taking into account that within the government sector all tax payments cancel out, a public enterprise in an economy with distortionary wage taxation will be more labor intensive than a private firm. However, an unequal tax treatment of public and private sectors distorts away the economy from production efficiency. In a general equilibrium model, incurring this inefficiency is worthwhile from ...

When labor incomes approach subsistence levels, the labor supply curve slopes outward, because the fight for survival mandates households to look for longer work hours in response to falling wage rates. We explore conditions under which near-subsistence scenarios may imply wage traps, labor market failures that can be the cause of undernourishment, illiteracy, and child labor. After stating gen...

The study first identified fully efficient farmers and then estimated technical efficiency of inefficient farmers, identifying their determinants by applying a Zero Inefficiency Stochastic Frontier Model (ZISFM) on a sample of 300 rice farmers from central-northern Thailand. Next, the study developed scenarios of potential production increase and resource conservation if technical inefficiency ...

Livestock production is a major consumer of fresh water, and the influence of livestock production on global fresh water resources is increasing because of the growing demand for livestock products. Increasing water use efficiency of livestock production, therefore, can contribute to the overall water use efficiency of agriculture. Previous studies have reported significant variation in livesto...

Decision making in companies requires an assessment of the efficiency and productivity of individual inputs to provide insights into the scope for improvement of inputs' use. This paper estimates an inputspecific Luenberger productivity growth indicator that can be decomposed to identify the contributions of input-specific technological change, technical efficiency change and scale efficiency c...

The global manufacturing development faces the new challenges including waste of resources, short delivery time, labor cost increase, short of labor, etc.. As a result, the overall industry environment of plastic materials manufacturing turns to focus on automatic production that enables manufacturing industry entering into the next phase so that production efficiency, man-made errors, and labo...

Since China accelerated its market oriented economic reforms at the end of 1992, its energy intensity has declined 3.6% annually over 1993–2005. However, its energy intensity declined 4.2% annually during its first reform period 1979–1992. Therefore, can we conclude that the accelerated marketization since the end of 1992 has made no contribution to its energy efficiency improvement? In order t...

Differences in income levels across countries are generally attributed to differences in productivity. In studies of internal migration (e.g. within the U.S.), it is commonly observed that skilled workers move much more than unskilled workers. The paper analyzes the implications of such differential migration, using a model in which efficiency differences are labor-augmenting, and free trade in...

Insufficient access to assets is the main determinant of poverty. We analyze the role of access to assets in explaining household labor allocation strategies, sources of income, levels of income achieved, and poverty headcount ratios among classes of Mexican rural households. To assess the gains from asset redistribution, we both measure the direct income effects from redistribution and simulat...