Radio frequency identification (RFID) is one of the most influential technologies of the twenty-first century. Today, RFID technology is being applied in a wide array of disciplines in science research and industrial projects. The significant impact of RFID is clearly visible by the rate of...

China has experienced dramatic trade liberalization in the late 1990s. In this paper, I investigate the impact of trade liberalization on firm productivity by using both Chinese manufacturing firm-level data and highly disaggregated Chinese import data over 1998-2002. For this purpose, I first...

The growth of agricultural productivity is widely believed to be low. But this study finds the productivity growth rate in agriculture to be higher than that in manufacturing, both on average and for groups of countries at different stages of development. This suggests that a large agricultural...

This paper traces the role of local content in Zambia's mining sector in supporting industrialization and economic diversification. It assesses productive linkages and manufacturing competitiveness during import-substitution industrialization and post-1991 liberalization and privatization, and...

The recent phase of globalization has witnessed increasing influence of Asian countries in the global economy. This is supported by the rise of Asian firms and their increasing presence in economic activities across the globe through innovations in manufacturing. This paper attempts to trace the...

We build a model of firm entry and exit and show how returns to scale shape firm survival, the equilibrium productivity and size distributions and firm concentration. High productivity dispersion and high concentration ratios need not reflect inefficiencies when returns to scale are strongly...

The aggregate labor share in U.S. manufacturing declined dramatically over the last three decades: Since the mid-1980's, the compensation for labor declined from 67% to 47% of value added which is unseen in any other sector of the U.S. economy. The labor share of the typical U.S. manufacturing...

The appearance of relationship quality paradigm in the field of international business has resulted in growing need to manage, develop and evaluate relationships amongst the exporters and importers besides influencing the profitability of the firm in the long-run. In the same light, this study...

We investigate the behavior of three versions of the translog cost function: the standard Log-quadratic version and two nonlinear versions with exponential and linear technical progress biases, respectively. Their performances are assessed according to three criteria: (i) on theoretical ground,...

Italy has yet to recover from the economic consequences of the financial and sovereign debt crisis that began more than a decade ago. In addition to losing 1.4 million jobs across the manufacturing and construction sectors, new industries driving growth across the EU, such as knowledge-intensive...