This paper answers the puzzling questions that why under the similar set of economic conditions service sector in India grew while manufacturing could not and how economic reforms in 1990s accelerated the productivity growth. The paper provides a very innovative and convincing explanation. Two...

Studies on Indian manufacturing have been unable to provide consistent estimates of productivity and its growth rates. This paper performs detailed and exhaustive set of accounting exercises for the period 1970-2003 using production function, index number and envelopment analysis methods. TFP...

The Malmquist productivity index is one of the best known and most widely used measures in the economic literature to quantify and decompose changes in productivity of multi-input multi-output production processes over time. Two main approaches are used to calculate this index: the adjacent...

The conventional estimate of technological progress and aggregate productivity growth, the total factor productivity, or TFP, can be upwardly biased if environmental externalities generated during the production processes are not accounted for. In this paper, we revisit TFP growth rates across...

This paper models the firm's production process as a system of simultaneous technologies for desirable and undesirable outputs. Desirable outputs are produced by transforming inputs via the conventional transformation function, whereas (consistent with the material balance condition) undesirable...

The paper analyzes Switzerland’s improvement in standard of living over the year 1960-2008. The paper utilizes index number and Translog production framework approach developed by Diewert, Lawrence, Wales, Morrison, Kohli and others. First a standard TFP measure is computed using index number...

Shephard’s distance functions are widely used instruments for characterizing technology and for estimating efficiency in contemporary economic theory and practice. Recently, they have been generalized by the Luenberger shortage function, or Chambers-Chung-Färe directional distance function....

This paper reviews the possibility that Harvard barometers would have enabled to predict the Great Depression. Based on data from the ABC curves in August 1929, could have been foreseen the collapse of the stock market and the dramatic fall in economic activity?. It is now accepted that Harvard...

This paper explores the disconnect of Federal Reserve data from index number theory. A consequence could have been the decreased systemic-risk misperceptions that contributed to excess risk taking prior to the housing bust. We find that most recessions in the past 50 years were preceded by more...

Using the annual data of real GDP from 1970 to 2010, this paper examines the synchronization of business cycles in the WAEMU. Two methods are used. First we calculate the cross correlations between cyclical components of real GDP of the different economies of the Union. The study then evaluate...