Competitive Pressure and Labor Productivity: World Iron-Ore Markets in the 1980's

摘要

While a widespread view says that competitive pressure influences productivity, the evidence to support this view is not overwhelming. In our opinion, this most likely reflects the difficulties in demonstrating the connection between competitive pressure and productivity (and not that there is no connection). We have presented a case where an increase in competitive pressure faced by producers, resulting from the shrinking of the producers' market, led to large gains in the labor productivity of those producers. We have also argued that those gains were driven by continuing mines, producing the same products, and using the same technology. In future work, we plan to study these sources of productivity gain in greater detail.