Trends of Total Factor Productivity in Egypt’s Pharmaceutical Industry: Evidence from the Nonparametric Malmquist Index Approach

In this paper, trends in total factor productivity (TFP) growth in 13 of Egypt’s largest and oldest pharmaceutical generics firms are examined. The paper relies on data envelopment analysis (DEA) —the non-parametric frontier methodology— to obtain the Malmquist productivity index for the sample firms, which account for 50% of Egypt’s generics market. The study period ranges from 1993 to 2005. Best-practice firms and laggard firms in the three aspects of efficiency change, technical change and TFP change are identified. Empirical results indicate the best-practice firm in terms of TFP change belongs to the private sector, while the laggard firm belongs to the state-owned public business sector. No differences of significance exist between the performance of private sector and state-owned generics companies. Additionally, state-owned companies which have been subject to partial privatization did not exhibit higher levels of TFP change than those which remained under full state-ownership. Empirical results also indicated that mean TFP change for the sample firms throughout the study period (1.01) exceeded the mean TFP change for all Egyptian industries (0.75), and that there was evident disassociation, or weak correlation at best, between productivity growth/regress and the degree of export orientation.