Aggregation of Scale Elasticities Across Firms

In this paper we propose new aggregate or ‘group’ primal and dual scale elasticity measures of an economic system (e.g., industry consisting of several firms, etc.). The main contribution of the paper is that we show under what assumptions a formal relationship between these new aggregate scale elasticity measures and the individual scale elasticities can be established. The derivations are based on the principles of economic optimization, and in particular on the duality theory of Shephard (1953) and the aggregation theory of Koopmans (1957).