1. Background In Australia, local government is established under State/Territory legislation and its structures, powers and functions are determined by that legislation. In all jurisdictions in the last 10-15 years, the relevant legislation creating and regulating local government has been reviewed and significantly amended or replaced with new legislation that gives local councils greater gen...

The growth of China's industry has been seriously depending on energy and environment. This paper attempts to apply the directional distance function and the Luenberger productivity index to measure the environmental efficiency, environmental total factor productivity, and its components at the level of subindustry in China over the period from 1999 to 2009 while considering energy consumption ...

Discussion around total factor productivity gains for the Australian Economy often focuses on infrastructure bottlenecks, technology adoption, competition and labour market flexibility. Although a potential area for gains, management is typically omitted from the public policy debate because it is considered too hard to quantify and as a result there is no concrete case for improvement. In this...

Data from the 2002 Supermarket Panel are used to estimate a supermarket production function with weekly gross margin as the output measure and store selling area and total labor hours as variable inputs. The model also includes productivity shifters describing format and service offerings, store ownership structure, unionization, and adoption of new information technologies and related business...

Using a panel of 21,582 Chinese firms over the period 2000-2005, we examine the relationship between the degree of foreign ownership and corporate performance in recipient firms. We find that foreign ownership is positively associated with firms’ return on assets, return on sales, labor productivity, and total factor productivity. Yet, the relationship exhibits an inverted U-shaped pattern: cor...

This paper investigates the relationship between firm productivity and four different board characteristics, including board size, board composition, board ownership and board leadership. Using total factor productivity (TFP) as a measure for productivity, we find an inverse association between board size and productivity and a positive relationship between board composition and productivity in...