Productivity Growth: Technological Progress and Technical Efficiency

摘要

Existing empirical evidence (Baumol, American Economic Review, 1986; Abramovitz, Journal of Economic History, 1986) has shown the importance of productivity growth in explaining production dynamics over time. Technological progress has been identified as the key factor driving long-term productivity growth. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, the paper extends previous studies (Fare et al., American Economic Review, 1994; Caselli and Coleman, American Economic Review, 2006; Hsieh and Klenow, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2010; Jones, Handbook of Macroeconomics, 2016) and quantifies the contribution of technological progress and technical efficiency to productivity growth using non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with a sample from both developed and developing countries. Second, the paper extends the sample period from 1980 to 2017 to study recent trends. The current study uses data from the Penn World Table (PWT 9.1, Feenstra et al., American Economic Review, 2015) for a sample of 92 countries.