Statistical precision of productivity change: A bootstrap application to Taiwan’s telecommunications industry

This study investigates the impacts of telecommunications policy on productivity change of the Chunghwa Telecom Company (CHT) from pre- to post-privatization. A three-stage method is employed to measure the productivity scores of CHT during the period 1966–2008. The Malmquist productivity index (MPI) is used in the first stage to assess the productivity of CHT. In the second stage, the statistical confidence intervals of productivity scores of CHT were obtained using the bootstrapping algorithm. Finally, the Chow test and multiple regression models were also utilized to investigate the impact of telecommunications policy on productivity change of CHT. Results of empirical examination indicate that on average TFP scores obtained by the bootstrapping technique are smaller than those obtained by the MPI technique. In addition, there is no difference in productivity change of CHT between pre- and post-privatization according to the MPI and bootstrapping MPI. The results show that the effect of privatization on productivity change is insignificant. Instead, the operational efficiency of CHT is affected by the government involvement in decision-making under its private/public joint ownership, which causes CHT to be a firm with little managerial profit orientation.