A conventional decomposition of the financial sector's gross value added growth into its various components indicates that investments in Information and Communication Technologies are highly important. However, a more comprehensive calculation reveals that growth is the result of - in...

Wird das Wachstum der Bruttowertschöpfung des Finanzsektors auf herkömmliche Weise in seine Komponenten zerlegt, scheinen Investitionen in Informations- und Kommunikations-Technologien eine große Bedeutung zu haben. Bei einem umfassenderen Berechnungsansatz zeigt sich jedoch, dass Wachstum...

This paper studies the productivity impact of heterogeneous capital inputs of selected EU-15 member countries and of the U.S. at the macroeconomic level. The stochastic possibility frontiers approach of Battese and Coelli (1992) applied here is used to identify neutralities or non-neutralities...

On 11-12 November 2008, SUERF and Banque Centrale du Luxembourg organized a conference on Productivity in the Financial Services Sector on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Banque Centrale du Luxembourg. The conference addressed three main themes: first, stylized facts on banks'...

The paper addresses the topic of an overall long-term productivity slowdown in labor productivity for a panel of 25 developed countries. Besides studying individual long-term trends of single countries using filtering techniques we also test for multiple structural breakpoints in the long-term...

The long-term development in productivity in an economy is the main indicator in an assessment of the outlook for economic development. In theory, countries that lag behind the leading countries in productivity should gradually succeed in closing that gap. Since the mid-1990s the Federal...

In an international comparison of the efficiency of the telecommunications (TC) industry for the period 1981 to 2002 Germany is in a middle position; France and Great Britain are better, while the Netherlands and the United States are in a less favourable position. However, supply-side...

About the end of 2006, Microsoft began delivering its new Windows Vista PC operating system to large commercial customers, followed by final users and small businesses. Even before the product reached the market, the dominant provider of PC operating systems worldwide was accused over and over...

Since mid 2007 there has been a dramatic rise in prices for basic foods such as internationally traded varieties of rice, corn and wheat. At the moment, it is rather impossible to estimate how far speculation in the commodity markets has contributed to this development. Irrespective of this, a...

By international comparison the productivity development of the overall economy in Germany has taken a serious hit after the reunification boom. Since then Germany has fallen behind not only in comparison to the USA and emerging-market nations like South Korea, but also in comparison to other EU...