IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/jet/dpaper/dpaper129.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Has Low Productivity Constrained Competitiveness of African Firms? : Comparison of the Firm Performances with Asian Firms

Author

Listed:
  • Fukunishi, Takahiro

Abstract

It has been argued that poor productive performance is one of critical sources of stagnation of the African manufacturing sector, but firm-level empirical supports are limited. Using the inter-regional firm data of the garment industry, technical efficiency and its contribution to competitiveness measured as unit costs were compared between Kenyan and Bangladeshi firms. Our estimates indicated that there is no significant gap in the average technical efficiency of the two industries despite conservative estimation, although unit costs greatly differ between the two industries. Higher unit cost in Kenyan firms mainly stems from high labour cost, while impact of inefficiency is quite small. Productivity accounts little for the stagnation of garment industry in several African countries.

Suggested Citation

  • Fukunishi, Takahiro, 2007. "Has Low Productivity Constrained Competitiveness of African Firms? : Comparison of the Firm Performances with Asian Firms," IDE Discussion Papers 129, Institute of Developing Economies, Japan External Trade Organization(JETRO).
    • Handle: RePEc:jet:dpaper:dpaper129
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ir.ide.go.jp/?action=repository_action_common_download&item_id=38038&item_no=1&attribute_id=22&file_no=1
    File Function: First version, 2007
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Technical efficiency; Allocative efficiency; Manufacturing; Sub-Saharan Africa; Productivity; Manufacturing industries; Kenya; Bangladesh; 技術効率; 配分効率; サハラ以南アフリカ; 生産性; 製造業; ケニア; バングラデシュ;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D24 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Production; Cost; Capital; Capital, Total Factor, and Multifactor Productivity; Capacity
    • L67 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Manufacturing - - - Other Consumer Nondurables: Clothing, Textiles, Shoes, and Leather Goods; Household Goods; Sports Equipment
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:jet:dpaper:dpaper129. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Michitaka Imamitsu (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/idegvjp.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.