The author of this note takes it as self evident that prosperity and the provision of "things" (buildings, roads, furniture, furnishings, clothes, machines and equipment of all sorts) go together. The way people generally speak and act is in line with this view. If this is so, domestic...

This paper seeks to dispel some of the myths commonly harboured about service jobs, service trade and the contribution services make to productivity improvements and living standards. Services account for more than three-quarters of national output and for four out of every five jobs.

Is industrial production relatively in decline? No, it is not. This note displays the evidence that for the last 40 years, in the 6 largest economies of the world, industrial production has kept pace with total output.

Our paper decomposes knowledge-diffusing trade flows and estimates their impacts separately. Overall, trade generates positive knowledge spillovers, but the effects of intra-industry trade are ambiguous. With regard to sectoral import penetration, we find that potential positive spillovers are...

In most OECD countries, the business services industry has grown much faster than the market sector as a whole. The industry in most cases, however, has displayed stagnating productivity growth, in some periods even a fall in productivity. Does this fast-growing industry with a bad productivity...

In addition to providing direct patient care, some hospitals also are used as training grounds for medical students and physicians-in-training (medical residents). Because of these additional responsibilities, total costs are higher in teaching hospitals than their non-teaching counterparts. In...

This work attempts to shed light on the “information technology productivity paradox”. Employing a large data set of Italian manufacturing firms we compute ICT marginal productivity across different cluster of firms and the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on output...

The Malmquist productivity index has many attractive features. One is that it decomposes into a technical efficiency change index and a technical change index. Under constant returns to scale, its technical efficiency change index has been decomposed into a "pure" technical efficiency change...

The notion of de-industrialisation arises from the fact that industrial employment, having risen rapidly, is now in equally rapid decline. This paper presents the view that agriculture and industry together form, and have always formed, a logically seamless "primary" sector which from the...

This paper finds that the rapid update of information and communication technologies contributed to Australia’s strong productivity performance in the 1990s and the contribution to labour productivity growth was at least as strong as it was in the US. Australia generated a productivity...