Production often causes pollution as a by-product. Once pollution problems become too severe, regulation is introduced by political authorities which forces the economy to make a transition to cleaner production processes. We model this transition as a change in "general purpose technology"...

We apply a stochastic frontier production model to data from 53 countries during 1991-2003 to estimate total factor productivity growth, and decompose it into technical efficiency change and technical progress. Our empirical results indicate that world productivity growth was led by fast-growing...