Falling Trade Costs, Heterogeneous Firms, and Industry Dynamics PDF Download

Author: Andrew B. Bernard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Commerce
Languages : en
Pages : 50

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Book Description
This paper examines the response of industries and firms to changes in trade costs. Several new firm-level models of international trade with heterogeneous firms predict that industry productivity will rise as trade costs fall due to the reallocation of activity across plants within an industry. Using disaggregated U.S. import data, we create a new measure of trade costs over time and industries. As the models predict, productivity growth is faster in industries with falling trade costs. We also find evidence supporting the major hypotheses of the heterogenous-firm models. Plants in industries with falling trade costs are more likely to die or become exporters. Existing exporters increase their shipments abroad. The results do not apply equally across all sectors but are strongest for industries most likely to be producing horizontally-differentiated tradeable goods.

Author: Ana Paula Cusolito
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 1464813620
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Productivity has again moved to center stage in two critical academic and policy debates: the slowing of global growth amid spectacular technological advances, and developing countries’ frustratingly slow progress in catching up to the technological frontier. Productivity Revisited brings together the new conceptual advances of 'second-wave' productivity analysis that have revolutionized the study of productivity, calling much previous analysis into question while providing a new set of tools for approaching these debates. The book extends this analysis and, using unique data sets from multiple developing countries, grounds it in the developing-country context. It calls for rebalancing away from an exclusive focus on misallocation toward a greater focus on upgrading firms and facilitating the emergence of productive new establishments. Such an approach requires a supportive environment and various types of human capital--managerial, technical, and actuarial--necessary to cultivate new transformational firms. The book is the second volume of the World Bank Productivity Project, which seeks to bring frontier thinking on the measurement and determinants of productivity to global policy makers.

Author: Alistair Dieppe
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 1464816093
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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Book Description
The COVID-19 pandemic struck the global economy after a decade that featured a broad-based slowdown in productivity growth. Global Productivity: Trends, Drivers, and Policies presents the first comprehensive analysis of the evolution and drivers of productivity growth, examines the effects of COVID-19 on productivity, and discusses a wide range of policies needed to rekindle productivity growth. The book also provides a far-reaching data set of multiple measures of productivity for up to 164 advanced economies and emerging market and developing economies, and it introduces a new sectoral database of productivity. The World Bank has created an extraordinary book on productivity, covering a large group of countries and using a wide variety of data sources. There is an emphasis on emerging and developing economies, whereas the prior literature has concentrated on developed economies. The book seeks to understand growth patterns and quantify the role of (among other things) the reallocation of factors, technological change, and the impact of natural disasters, including the COVID-19 pandemic. This book is must-reading for specialists in emerging economies but also provides deep insights for anyone interested in economic growth and productivity. Martin Neil Baily Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution Former Chair, U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers This is an important book at a critical time. As the book notes, global productivity growth had already been slowing prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and collapses with the pandemic. If we want an effective recovery, we have to understand what was driving these long-run trends. The book presents a novel global approach to examining the levels, growth rates, and drivers of productivity growth. For anyone wanting to understand or influence productivity growth, this is an essential read. Nicholas Bloom William D. Eberle Professor of Economics, Stanford University The COVID-19 pandemic hit a global economy that was already struggling with an adverse pre-existing condition—slow productivity growth. This extraordinarily valuable and timely book brings considerable new evidence that shows the broad-based, long-standing nature of the slowdown. It is comprehensive, with an exceptional focus on emerging market and developing economies. Importantly, it shows how severe disasters (of which COVID-19 is just the latest) typically harm productivity. There are no silver bullets, but the book suggests sensible strategies to improve growth prospects. John Fernald Schroders Chaired Professor of European Competitiveness and Reform and Professor of Economics, INSEAD

Author: Charles R. Hulten
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226360644
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 648

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Book Description
The productivity slowdown of the 1970s and 1980s and the resumption of productivity growth in the 1990s have provoked controversy among policymakers and researchers. Economists have been forced to reexamine fundamental questions of measurement technique. Some researchers argue that econometric approaches to productivity measurement usefully address shortcomings of the dominant index number techniques while others maintain that current productivity statistics underreport damage to the environment. In this book, the contributors propose innovative approaches to these issues. The result is a state-of-the-art exposition of contemporary productivity analysis. Charles R. Hulten is professor of economics at the University of Maryland. He has been a senior research associate at the Urban Institute and is chair of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Michael Harper is chief of the Division of Productivity Research at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Edwin R. Dean, formerly associate commissioner for Productivity and Technology at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is adjunct professor of economics at The George Washington University.

Author: Cem Karayalcin
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1484350057
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 30

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Book Description
The process of economic development is characterized by substantial reallocations of resources across sectors. In this paper, we construct a multi-sector model in which there are barriers to the movement of labor from low-productivity traditional agriculture to modern sectors. With the barrier in place, we show that improvements in productivity in modern sectors (including agriculture) or reductions in transportation costs may lead to a rise in agricultural employment and through terms-oftrade effects may harm subsistence farmers if the traditional subsistence sector is larger than a critical level. This suggests that policy advice based on the earlier literature needs to be revised. Reducing barriers to mobility (through reductions in the cost of skill acquisition and institutional changes) and improving the productivity of subsistence farmers needs to precede policies designed to increase the productivity of modern sectors or decrease transportation costs.

Author: Carol Corrado
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226116174
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 602

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Book Description
As the accelerated technological advances of the past two decades continue to reshape the United States' economy, intangible assets and high-technology investments are taking larger roles. These developments have raised a number of concerns, such as: how do we measure intangible assets? Are we accurately appraising newer, high-technology capital? The answers to these questions have broad implications for the assessment of the economy's growth over the long term, for the pace of technological advancement in the economy, and for estimates of the nation's wealth. In Measuring Capital in the New Economy, Carol Corrado, John Haltiwanger, Daniel Sichel, and a host of distinguished collaborators offer new approaches for measuring capital in an economy that is increasingly dominated by high-technology capital and intangible assets. As the contributors show, high-tech capital and intangible assets affect the economy in ways that are notoriously difficult to appraise. In this detailed and thorough analysis of the problem and its solutions, the contributors study the nature of these relationships and provide guidance as to what factors should be included in calculations of different types of capital for economists, policymakers, and the financial and accounting communities alike.

Author: British Library of Political and Economic Science Staff
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780415447171
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 664

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Book Description
First published in 2007. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Author: OECD
Publisher: OECD Publishing
ISBN: 9264861556
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
This report represents the second outcome of the collaboration between the Asian Productivity Organization (APO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to improve the measurement and analysis of productivity developments across APO and OECD member economies. The report discusses the potential impact of COVID-19 on productivity and examines the role of Multifactor Productivity (MFP) as a major driver of economic growth and changes in living standards.

Author: Stephen L. Parente
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262264082
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
Why isn't the whole world as rich as the United States? Conventional views holds that differences in the share of output invested by countries account for this disparity. Not so, say Stephen Parente and Edward Prescott. In Barriers to Riches, Parente and Prescott argue that differences in Total Factor Productivity (TFP) explain this phenomenon. These differences exist because some countries erect barriers to the efficient use of readily available technology. The purpose of these barriers is to protect industry insiders with vested interests in current production processes from outside competition. Were this protection stopped, rapid TFP growth would follow in the poor countries, and the whole world would soon be rich. Barriers to Riches reflects a decade of research by the authors on this question. Like other books on the subject, it makes use of historical examples and industry studies to illuminate potential explanations for income differences. Unlike these other books, however, it uses aggregate data and general equilibrium models to evaluate the plausibility of alternative explanations. The result of this approach is the most complete and coherent treatment of the subject to date.

Author: Elhanan Helpman
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262580984
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
This sequel to Market Structure and Foreign Trade examines the new international trade's applied side. It provides a compact guide to models of the effects of trade policy in imperfectly competitive markets, as well as an up-to-date survey of existing knowledge, which is extended by the authors' useful interpretations of the results.