We show that in a Malthusian world an increase in taxes raises average labour productivity by culling marginal workers and reducing equilibrium population. Thus states with higher taxes will have higher labour productivity, ceteris paribus, and an increase in taxes in a particular state will generate an increase over time in labour productivity (”economic growth”). Landowners create the same ef...

Labour Power and Stagnant Industrial Labor Productivity in Late Colonial India Susan Wolcott Sivasubramonian’s (2000) data on Indian industrial labour productivity indicate 15 percent growth in the period 1900-1938. However, a detailed examination of these data show that most measured growth in large-scale organized industry can be attributed to the enormous gains made by Tata Iron and Steel (T...

Agriculture is an important engine of growth and poverty reduction in much of Africa, Nigeria inclusive. But the sector is underperforming in part because women, who are often crucial resource in agriculture and rural economy, face constraints that reduce their productivity. An understanding of these constraints is a prerequisite to devising policies to improve agricultural production and produ...

Good morning. When CEDA approached me about speaking today, I was asked to concentrate on longer-term developments that will have a bearing on Australia’s future economic performance. Such an offer seemed hard to refuse, and so I looked around for a topic on which I could hopefully say something of interest. Given the impressive productivity growth that has been experienced over the past decade...

................................................................................................................................................... 1 LABOUR MARKET MISMATCH AND LABOUR PRODUCTIVITY: EVIDENCE FROM PIAAC DATA .............................................................................................................................................................. 4

We document novel shifts in the lead-lag properties of the US business cycle since the mid-1980s that have gone unnoticed in contemporary research. Specifically, (i) the well-known inverted-leading-indicator-property of real interest rates has completely vanished; (ii) labour productivity switched from leading positively to lagging negatively over the cycle; (iii) Labour input measures shifted ...

A simmering crisis in the Nigerian agriculture today involves labour and the crisis manifests itself in the degree of labour availability, labour demand and labour productivity. One of the major products of this crisis is the increased participation of children in paid, non-familiar agricultural jobs. Agriculture ranks as one of the three most dangerous work activities, along with mining and co...

The share market boom in the 1990s is often linked to the acceleration in labour productivity over the same period. This paper explores the suggestions that labour productivity may be an inaccurate measure of firm’s cash flow which underlies equity valuations, and that innovations in productivity in the 1990s may have had only have temporary effects on capital productivity, the key element of t...

"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 implement an endogeneous switching-regression model for labour productivity and firms’ decision to use business–to–business (B2B) e–commerce. Our approach allows B2B usage to affect any parameter of the labour productivity equation and to properly take account of strategic complementarities between the input factors and B2B usage. Empirical evidence from 1,394 German firms shows that firms u...