This paper shows that unit labor costs (ulcs), the most widely used measure of competitiveness, can be interpreted as the labor share in output multiplied by a price-adjustment factor. This has three main implications. First, ulcs are not just a technical concept since they embody the social...

This paper evaluates the methodological foundations of some recent attempts to estimate econometrically the degree of market power and the degree of returns to scale in manufacturing. The method discussed is based on estimating the aggregate production function in growth rate form. It is argued,...

This comment raises three main issues about He and Qin's (2004)attempt at modeling investment in the PRC. The first is this author's skepticism about the general applicability of the neoclassical model of investment to the PRC. Second, that their model for business investment, based on the...

This paper shows that previous arguments about the problems in interpreting the coefficients in multiplicative-logarithmic functions, derived from an arbitrary rebasing of the series, are incorrect. In the specific case of the translog production function, the tests for the CES, Cobb-Douglas and...

This paper takes a sample of 16 Asian countries and shows that: (i) Income levels in Asia have not tended to converge during the last 30 years, (ii) There has not been a catch-up process with the US: the initially more advanced Asian countries have reduced the income gap with the US faster....

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to document the transformation of developing Asia's manufacturing sector during the last three decades. Design/methodology/approach – The paper briefly discusses the transformation during the last 30 years and benchmarks the sector by estimating a...

Unit labor costs in some of the eurozone countries, calculated using aggregate data, increased significantly during the years before the crisis. In this paper, we show that: (i) the construction of unit labor costs using aggregate data, the standard practice, leads to serious problems of...

We estimate the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s potential growth rate in 2012 at 8.7% and at 9.2% for the average of 2008–2012, about the same as the average actual growth rate for this period. This rate is the natural growth rate, that is, the rate consistent with a constant...

During the last few years, the newly coined term middle-income trap has been widely used by policymakers to refer to the middle-income economies that seem to be stuck in the middle-income range. However, there is no accepted definition of the term in the literature. In this paper, we study...