A Global View of Productivity Growth in China

How does a country's productivity growth affect worldwide real incomes through international trade? In this paper, we take this classic question to the data by measuring the spillover effects of China's productivity growth. Our framework features traditional terms-of-trade effects and new trade home market effects as suggested by the theoretical literature and works from a reference point which perfectly matches industry-level trade. Focusing on the years 1995 to 2007, we find that the cumulative welfare effect on individual regions ranges between -1.2 percent and 3.6 percent and only 3.0 percent of the worldwide gains of China's productivity growth accrue to the rest of the world.

Circulatory Disease in the NHS: Measuring Trends in Hospital Costs and Output

Following the publication of the Atkinson Review of the measurement of government outputs in the National Accounts, there has been great interest in measuring the productivity growth of the National Health Service. Such macro measures of productivity are important when deciding how much public money to devote to the NHS, and in holding the NHS to account. However, it is also important to gain an understanding of the productivity of individual programmes of care, so as to ensure that resources are allocated efficiently within the NHS. Hitherto, such information has not been available. This report is an exploratory study of the feasibility and usefulness of developing measures of growth in outputs, costs and productivity of a single programme of care within the NHS: hospital treatment of circulatory diseases.

Majority-Party Status and Gender: Understanding Productivity in the U.S. House of Representatives

This thesis examines differences in productivity levels from members of the 93rd to 115th United States House of Representatives with respect to majority-party status and gender. Using data from the Center of Effective Lawmaking, the study conducts a basic regression model using productivity as a function of whether or not the individual is a majority party member and their gender. Although the traditional measure of legislator success is legislative effectiveness, these measures take into account institutional differences. Productivity is measured by the amount of bills an individual legislator introduces and is dependent on the individual, not institutional approval that favors male legislators. Consistent with expectations, the regression models find strong patterns that majority-party status is, on average, predictive of productivity. However, within majority-party membership, there is no different in productivity between gender. These results could set a new standard for how we measure legislative success; rather than measuring success based on institutional approval, it is important to consider individual productivity as well

Measuring the effect of commitment on occupational stressors and individual productivity ties

Based upon existing literature, stress at the workplace has a negative effect on commitment. The negative effect on commitment jeopardizes individual productivity. The purpose of the present study is to determine the indirect effects of occupational stressors on individual productivity through the analysis of commitment variables. The respondents were selected utilizing the proportionate stratified random sampling method. A total of 300 questionnaires were collected from the academic administrators of 5 Malaysian research universities. The research instrument used for the stress and commitment components is adopted from the ASSET (A Shortened Stress Evaluation Tool). Meanwhile, the productivity component utilized the criteria employed by the annual performance appraisal of the research universities. Occupational stressors are analyzed dimensionally, while commitment and individual productivity are analyzed aggregately. The results show that certain occupational stressors are significantly, but negatively, related to commitment, including work relationships; work-life balance; overload; control; resources and communication; and pay and benefits. The results also indicate that certain occupational stressors are significantly, but negatively, related to individual productivity, including work relationships; work-life balance; job security; control; resources and communication; and pay and benefits. Finally, the present study finds that commitment partially mediates the aforementioned relationships

How competition controls team production: The case of fishing firms

Under team production, those who monitor individual productivity are usually the only ones compensated with a residual that varies with the performance of the team. This pattern is efficient, as is shown by the prevalence of conventional firms, except for small teams and when specialized monitoring is ineffective. Profit sharing in repeated team production induces all team members to take disciplinary action against underperformers through switching and separation decisions, however. Such action provides effective self-enforcemnt when the markets for team members are competitive, even for large teams using specialized monitoring. The traditional share system of fishing firms shows that for this competition to provide powerful enough incentives the costs of switching teams and measuring team productivity must be bellow. Risk allocation may constrain the organizational design defined by the use of a share system. It does not account for its existence, however.Theory of the firm, team production, share contracts, profit sharing, remuneration systems, self-enforcement, fishing firms

Exploring the feasibility of measuring individual labor productivity using a wearable activity tracker

Productivity measurement in the construction industry has received enormous attention from industry and academia. One of the most crucial factors for achieving high performance in a construction project is labor management. Despite technological advances, construction projects are still driven by labor intensive work. Onsite work productivity determines, to a great extent, the performance of construction projects. However, determining accurate productivity metrics remains a challenge for project managers. Productivity measurements are still collected or recorded manually from construction projects. Productivity assessments require that well-trained staff perform the measurements, and that considerable time is spent accurately collecting and analyzing the data. Moreover, whether the common data used for productivity calculations are accurate is questionable due to undocumented/unrecorded data. Productivity is measured at various levels such as by industry, by project, and by activity. Currently, there is no reliable way to measure productivity at the individual laborer level. Such measurement could provide detailed and accurate information about project productivity, if data from an appropriate number of workers is collected. Identification of the poor productivity performance would be improved using productivity recorded per second with personal and location data instead of hourly, daily or weekly productivity summaries. The principal objective of this research is to explore the potential of a new productivity measurement methodology that automatically collects laborer data used for calculating productivity. The basic concept is to utilize a wrist activity tracker for data collection process. It mainly consists of automated data collection, and automated/semi-automated data analysis. The basic work plan for extracting direct work hours from total work hours is to identify, understand, and input specific patterns that appear in each of the different activities in the data analysis process. For proof of concept, field experiments were conducted at three different sites. Results from actual observations (ground truth), and automated/semi-automated data analysis per experiment were compared to evaluate the proposed method.Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineerin

Comparative Output and Labour Productivity in Manufacturing for China, Japan, Korea and the United States in Circa 1935 by a Production PPP Approach

Following the standard methodology for measuring industry-of-origin or productionside PPPs, this study compares the unit values of manufacturing products in China, Japan, Korea and the US to calculate unit value ratios (UVRs) and hence estimates PPPs for individual manufacturing industries using the US as the base country in circa 1935. Based on the products that could be matched between these countries, the estimated manufacturing production PPPs for China, Japan and Korea are only from half to two thirds of the prevailing market exchange rates, suggesting much lower cost of production in manufacturing in these countries than in the US. The estimated PPPs are used to calculate industry-level output and labour productivity in China, Japan and Korea relative to those of the US in circa 1935. The results show that the size of factory manufacturing in Japan was 12 percent of the US level whereas in China it was only one percent and even lower in Korea. In terms of comparative labour productivity, measured as PPP$ per hour worked with the US as the reference, Japanese and Korean manufacturing was 24 and 23 percent of the US level, whereas Chinese manufacturing was only 7 percent of the US level.Production (industry-of-origin) purchasing power parity (PPP), unit value ratio, comparative output and labour productivity, comparative advantage, economic development