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Comparing TFP Catching-up and Capital Deepening in US and European Growths: A Directional Distance Function Approach

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  • Jean-Philippe Boussemart

    () (University of Lille 3, LEM-CNRS (UMR 8179), IESEG School of Management)

  • Hervé Leleu

    (LEM-CNRS (UMR 8179), IÉSEG School of Management)

Abstract

In Solow’s model the income convergence between countries arises from two main sources: a capital deepening effect resulting from the diminishing returns of the production technology and a technological transfer/diffusion effect related to Total Factor Productivity (TFP) differences. A large literature has been devoted to analyze these effects but most of the studies suffer from three weaknesses by defining the US as the a priori technological leader, by using a parametric functional form and by assuming constant returns to scale for the technology. Our paper offers an alternative approach based on a non-parametric programming framework and the estimation of directional distance functions. We explicitly separate country TFP differences into two components: a technology effect and a scale effect to study the catching-up process on each of them. We also analyze the role of the capital deepening effect by introducing a relevant measure of the structural efficiency which reveals inefficiencies due to changes in input-ratio differences. Our empirical work focuses on 15 European countries (EU) and the US over the period 1980-2004. We use time series procedures to test for convergence for individual countries or sub-sets of countries.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by IESEG School of Management in its series Working Papers with number 2008-ECO-01.

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Length: 27 pages
Date of creation: Jan 2008
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:ies:wpaper:e200801

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Keywords: TFP Catching-up; Capital Deepening; Convergence; Directional Distance Function. Running title: Comparing TFP Catching-up and Capital Deepening;

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References

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  14. Nazrul Islam, 2001. "Different Approaches to International Comparison of Total Factor Productivity," NBER Chapters, in: New Developments in Productivity Analysis, pages 465-508 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  15. Young, Alwyn, 1995. "The Tyranny of Numbers: Confronting the Statistical Realities of the East Asian Growth Experience," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 110(3), pages 641-80, August.
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