Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to document the transformation of developing Asia's manufacturing sector during the last three decades. Design/methodology/approach – The paper briefly discusses the transformation during the last 30 years and benchmarks the sector by estimating a...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the degree of structural change of the Philippine economy and examine how linkages among sectors evolved during 1979‐2000. Design/methodology/approach – The authors use the input‐output tables of the Philippines to draw the economic...

This paper shows that unit labor costs (ulcs), the most widely used measure of competitiveness, can be interpreted as the labor share in output multiplied by a price-adjustment factor. This has three main implications. First, ulcs are not just a technical concept since they embody the social...

This paper evaluates the methodological foundations of some recent attempts to estimate econometrically the degree of market power and the degree of returns to scale in manufacturing. The method discussed is based on estimating the aggregate production function in growth rate form. It is argued,...

This comment raises three main issues about He and Qin's (2004)attempt at modeling investment in the PRC. The first is this author's skepticism about the general applicability of the neoclassical model of investment to the PRC. Second, that their model for business investment, based on the...

This paper shows that previous arguments about the problems in interpreting the coefficients in multiplicative-logarithmic functions, derived from an arbitrary rebasing of the series, are incorrect. In the specific case of the translog production function, the tests for the CES, Cobb-Douglas and...