Productivity growth is decomposed into two components: technical change and efficiency change. This assesses their relative importance to the international competitiveness of the agricultural sectors of selected Caribbean countries. A nonparametric programming method is employed to compute...

How can we measure and compare the relative performance of production units? If input and output variables are one dimensional, then the simplest way is to compute efficiency by calculating and comparing the ratio of output and input for each production unit. This idea is inappropriate though,...

This paper raises several issues concerning productivity analysis. An attempt is made to demonstrate the usefulness of a micro-based approach to productivity analysis which challenges some basic assumptions of conventional analyses based on aggregate production functions. With the help of a...

A growth accounting and an econometric exercise are used to provide insights into the evolution of the Taiwanese economy over the period 1966-96. The approach links the GDP function of a multiple sector neoclassical growth model to growth accounting and, subsequently to the estimation of the...

Taking into account Kuznet’s hypothesis, considers the general relationship between the evolution and extension of market systems and the incidence of poverty and economic inequality. It suggests that a re-evaluation of the Kuznet’s curve is needed because income inequality has been rising...

Empirical evidence supports the proposition that national income growth is strongly affected by trade specialization and comparative advantage in eight economic sectors. Commercial policy distortions and factor intensity reversals explain why trade does not always fit the skilled labor continuum...

Innovation is largely held to be unlikely in rural regions. This reflects the current emphasis on regional innovations systems that are driven by large expenditures on formal science based activity that results in patentable outcomes. From this metric the observation about rural innovation is...