In the absense of frictionless trade, domestic productivity will be a major determinant of prices. Using repeated cross-sections of absolute prices of individual goods across European countries, I find that products of an industry tend to be cheaper in countries with higher productivity in that industry. Similarly, countries with higher productivity in manufacturing have lower prices for produc...

"Unemployment [in Australia] is affected by two factors: increases in the productivity of labour and increases in its supply. Both of these factors could, in principle, be offset by strong economic growth. But, if the economy grows fast enough to accommodate both productivity gains and the addition of migrants to the labour force, it will draw in more imports and the balance of trade will deter...

We are studying the manufacturing performance of semiconductor wafer fabrication plants in the US, Asia, and Europe. There are great similarities in production equipment, manufacturing processes, and products produced at these plants. Nevertheless, data reported here show that important quantitative measures of productivity vary by factors of 3 to as much as 5 across an international sample of ...

Since july 1991, major economic policy changes have been made under the economic reforms programme. The new policies have relaxed or removed many government controls on production capacity, imported capital goods, intermediate inputs and technology. These reforms have altered the economic environment in which the companies operate. This paper makes a comparative analysis of productivity growth ...

extensive government control over industrial and service sectors show it could not overcome the increasing misuse of public resources, raisins debts, lack of improvement in operation efficiency and mismanagement. numerous productivity programs could be a key to improve performances. in present article a case of productivity program in one of state owned enterprises (soes) namely isfahan steel m...

We examine factors determining productivity of firms’ information service activities, using most comprehensive data of information service industries in Japan. We focus on the degree of modularization and resulting outsourcing, economies/diseconomies of scale in software development, and firms’ organizational changes. Outsourcing has persistent negative effects on total factor productivity, sug...

Labor productivity in U.S. coal mining increased at an average annual rate of slightly over four percent during the past 45 years. This report examines key factors contributing to that record particularly, technological innovation in both surface and underground mining and concurrent geographic shifts in U.S. coal production. Health, safety, and environmental regulations introduced in the sixti...

abstract in this paper,using a structural decomposition analysis (sda) and the latest available input-output tables we investigate the sources of labor productivity growth in norway, south korea and iran. then, the contribution of each source in the growth of labor productivity is discussed. the results show that among six factors, value added coefficient is the most influencing factoracross al...