From 1962 to 2013, the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s)agricultural employment share declined from 82% to 31%. The transfer of workers out of low-productivity agriculture is a fundamental pillar of the PRC’s aspirations to progress and eventually become a high-income economy. We...

This paper considers the estimation of putative neoclassical aggregate labour demand functions using constant price value data. Regression results normally find that employment is negatively related to the real wage and that the constant-output elasticity of employment with respect to the real...

This paper considers the implications of the conceptual difference between the rental price of capital, embedded in the neoclassical cost identity (output equals the cost of labor plus the cost of capital), which is used in growth accounting studies; and the accounting profit rate, which can be...

Lawrence R. Klein pioneered the work on aggregation, in particular in production functions, in the 1940s. He paved the way for researchers to establish the conditions under which a series of micro production functions can be aggregated so as to yield an aggregate production function. This work...

We show that Mazumdar's recently proposed methods for estimating the elasticity of the wage bill with respect to output growth, and for decomposing the growth rate of the wage rate into an output effect, an employment effect, and a price effect, are problematic. The decomposition proposed is a...

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 discusses the recent controversy over the sources of economic growth in East Asia. This empirical work has either used growth accounting or estimated econometrically aggregate production functions. It is shown that it is possible to approximate the value-added accounting identity...