[go: up one dir, main page]
More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/
  EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Exploring reallocation’s apparent weak contribution to growth

Mitsukuni Nishida (), Amil Petrin () and Sašo Polanec

Journal of Productivity Analysis, 2014, vol. 42, issue 2, 187-210

Abstract: Two recent meta-analyses use variants of the Baily et al. (Brookings Papers Econ Act Microecon 1:187–267, 1992 ) (BHC) decompositions to ask whether recent robust growth in aggregate labor productivity (ALP) across 25 countries is due to lower barriers to input reallocation. They find weak gains from measured reallocation and strong within-plant productivity gains. We show these findings may be because BHC indices decompose ALP growth using plant-level output-per-labor (OL) as a proxy for the marginal product of labor and changes in OL as a proxy for changes in plant-level productivity. We provide simple examples to show that (1) reallocation growth from labor should track marginal changes in labor weighted by the marginal product of labor, (2) BHC reallocation growth can be positively correlated, negatively correlated, or uncorrelated with actual growth arising from the reallocation of inputs, and that (3) BHC indices can mistake growth from reallocation as growth from productivity, principally because OL is neither a perfect index of marginal products nor plant-level productivity. We then turn to micro-level data from Chile, Colombia, and Slovenia, and we find for the first two that BHC indices report weak or negative growth from labor reallocation. Using the reallocation definition based on marginal products we find a positive and robust role for labor reallocation in all three countries and a reduced role of plant-level technical efficiency in growth. We close by exploring potential corrections to the BHC decompositions but here we have limited success. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Keywords: Reallocation; Labor productivity; Aggregate productivity growth; Plant-level data; J24; L6; O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11123-013-0380-9 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Exploring Reallocation's Apparent Weak Contribution to Growth (2013) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jproda:v:42:y:2014:i:2:p:187-210

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/11123/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11123-013-0380-9

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Productivity Analysis is currently edited by William Greene, Chris O'Donnell and Victor Podinovski

More articles in Journal of Productivity Analysis from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2024-11-21
Handle: RePEc:kap:jproda:v:42:y:2014:i:2:p:187-210