This paper examines the determinants of firms’ skill shortages, using a specially-designed survey, the Business Strategy and Skills (BSS) module of the Business Operations Survey. We combine the BSS module with additional data on firms in the Statistics New Zealand’s prototype Longitudinal...

This paper summarises the results from two projects that investigated skills in New Zealand businesses. The first – The Impact of Skills on New Zealand Firms – combined three different surveys to investigate the availability of skills and skilled workers both within the firm and their...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of skill shortages on the supply of training within New Zealand firms. The study uses a specially designed survey, the Business Strategy and Skills (BSS) module of the Business Operations Survey 2008 (BOS 2008). The paper evaluates the impact of...

Self-selection of productive firms to exporting suggests that non-exporters are less productive and locked out of international markets due to low productivity. Using a panel dataset of 88,752 New Zealand agriculture and forestry sector firms over the period 2000-07, this paper measures the...

In this paper, we examine the three facets of technology: its creation, dispersion and absorption. We investigate whether differences in absorptive capacity help to explain cross-country differences in the level of productivity. We utilize stochastic frontier analysis to investigate two...

With imperfect markets for the services of the higher education sector, it is important to assess the effectiveness of institutions. Previous studies have analysed the costs of universities but few their efficiency. In this paper, we examine the costs and efficiency of English and Welsh...

This paper considers methods to measure output and productivity in the delivery of health services, with an application to NHS hospital sector. It first develops a theoretical framework for measuring quality adjusted outputs and then considers how this might be implemented given available data....

We consider the measurement of performance in the public sector in general, focussing on local government and the provision of library services by English local authorities in particular. We will consider two methodologies that assess the performance of local authorities in terms of the...