Cognitive skills are robustly associated with good national economic performance. How much of this is due to high-skill countries doing a better job of absorbing total factor productivity from the world's technology leader? Following Benhabib and Spiegel (Handbook of Economic Growth, 2005), who...

This paper assesses the evolution of output and productivity in the Greek banking industry for the period 1990-2006. Three main categories of bank output were estimated based on modern theoretical approaches, while for the estimation of output and productivity (partial and total factor) we...

Sudanese external debts became a chronic problem for the past thirty years. They were first acquired for economic development projects, failed to fulfill that function due to many reasons, economic planning, mismanagement, political turmoil, failure in absorption capacity, corruption…etc. For...

This paper presents estimates of intangible investment in Canada for the purpose of innovation, advertising and resource extraction. It first expands upon work by Beckstead and Gellatly (2003), Baldwin and Hanel (2003), Beckstead and Gellatly (2003), Beckstead and Vinodrai (2003) and Baldwin and...

ICT capital is an important driver of productivity growth. Using data from the EUKLEMS growth accounts, we show that ICT has made smaller contributions to labour productivity growth in the EU-15 than in the US, both at the macro level and at the level of individual sectors. At the same time,...

Many historical comparisons of international productivity use measures of labour productivity (output per worker). Differences in labour productivity can be caused by differences in technical efficiency or differences in capital intensity. Moving to measures of total factor productivity allows...

This paper makes use of a growth accounting framework to examine the importance of public capital for private sector productivity growth. Most measures of multifactor productivity consider only the inputs of the business sector. This paper produces an alternate measure of multifactor...

This paper compares the productivity growth of a set of Canadian and U.S. regulated industries. Using data from Statistics Canada's KLEMS database and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the paper examines productivity growth in transportation services (which includes air and rail),...

This paper has three main objectives. First, it examines the level of multifactor productivity (MFP) in Canada relative to that of the United States for the 1994-to-2003 period. Second, it examines the relative importance of differences in capital intensity and MFP in accounting for the labour...