A framework for applied production theory should focus on the crucial features of the industry to be studied. First of all, to be useful for a dynamic study, a distinction has to be made between the theoretical production possibilities before investment takes place and the actual empirical...

This paper introduces a decomposition of the Malmquist productivity index into component indexes. The motivation is to derive an analogue of the decomposition of the Törnqvist index into productivity and quality change provided by Fixler and Zieschang (1992) to the Malmquist index. Since we...