A new spatial decomposition of total factor productivity growth into direct (own) and indirect (spillover) components is set out. We then apply the decomposition in the context of a spatial autoregressive production frontier analysis of 40 European countries over the period 1995–2008.

Unit specific effects are often used to estimate non-spatial efficiency. We extend such estimators to the case where there is spatial autoregressive dependence and introduce the concept of spillover efficiency. Intuitively, we present an approach to benchmark how successful units are at...