This paper uses the detailed information in the 1995 Census of Industrial Production as a benchmark for analysing the coverage, concepts and consistency of published statistical series. On the basis of the analysis, the paper proposes a series of adjustments which result in more consistent...

In this paper I consider 28 developed and developing countries, in the period 1980- 1995, and I employ the Within Group and the Generalized Method of Moments estimators to test, respectively, for Total Factor Productivity determinants and labor productivity convergence driving forces...

The maturing of the manufacturing sector in many Asian countries, combined with the relative backwardness of its services sector, has made services sector development a top priority for developing Asia. Our central objective is to broadly survey and analyze the current landscape of the region's...

Do telecoms really contribute to the economic development of developing countries? After funding a new mobile phone operator in Haiti, the Agence Française de Développement and Proparco have been willing to assess the impact of the arrival of this new operator on the Haitian economy. This case...

The maturing of the manufacturing sector in many Asian countries, combined with the relative backwardness of its service sector, has made service sector development a top priority for developing Asia. Our central objective is to broadly survey and analyze the current landscape of the region's...

There is a widespread perception that the Republic of Korea's service sector lags behind its dynamic world-class manufacturing sector. We empirically analyze the past performance of the Republic of Korea's service sector in order to assess its prospects as an engine of growth. Our analysis...

A striking feature of micro-level plant data is the presence of significant variation in factor cost shares across plants within an industry. We develop a methodology to decompose this variation into idiosyncratic and group-specific components and to use cluster analysis to recover the number...

In a recent article, Ritschl (2008) criticized findings of Broadberry and Burhop (2007) regarding the comparative level of manufacturing labour productivity in Germany compared to Britain between 1895 and 1938. In this paper, we re-evaluate Ritschl's claims and show that our earlier results are...

While the US experienced two successive labor productivity surges in 1995 and 2000, Germany's productivity declined dramatically during the same period. We examine the sources of Germany's productivity demise using the ifo industry growth accounting database that provides detailed industry-level...

India has followed an idiosyncratic pattern of development, certainly compared with other fast-growing Asian economies. While the importance of services rather than manufacturing is widely noted, within manufacturing India has emphasized skill-intensive rather than labor-intensive manufacturing,...