Cross-country Conversion Factors for Sectoral Productivity Comparisons

International comparisons of the level of labor or total factor productivity have used exchange rates or purchasing power parity (PPP) to make output and capital comparable across countries. Recent evidence suggests that aggregate PPP holds rather well in the long run, making it a good basis for comparison. At the same time, sectoral deviations from PPP are very persistent, raising the need for disaggregate price measures to make disaggregate productivity comparisons. Sectoral differences in the importance of nontradables make it even more important to work with sectoral prices when country-comparisons are made at the sectoral level. Mapping prices from household expenditure surveys into the industrial classification of sectors and adjusting for taxes and international trade, I obtain a sector-specific PPP measure. The few previous studies that used sectoral prices only had conversion factors available for a single year. With price data for 1985, 1990, 1993, and 1996, I am the first to test whether the constructed conversion factors adequately capture differential changes in relative prices between countries. For some industries--Agriculture, Mining, and less sophisticated manufacturing sectors--the indices prove adequate. For most other industries, aggregate PPP is a superior currency conversion factor.

Wage and Productivity Premiums in Sub-Saharan Africa

Using a matched employer-employee data set of manufacturing plants in three sub-Saharan countries, I compare the marginal productivity of different categories of workers with the wages they earn. A methodological contribution is to estimate the firm level production function jointly with the individual level wage equation using a feasible GLS estimator. The additional information of individual workers leads to more precise estimates, especially of the wage premiums, and to a more accurate test. The results indicate that equality holds strongly for the most developed country in the sample (Zimbabwe), but not at all for the least developed country (Tanzania). Moreover, the breakdown in correct remuneration in the two least developed countries follows a distinct pattern. On the one hand, wage premiums exceed productivity premiums for general human capital characteristics (experience and schooling). On the other hand, salaries hardly increase for more firm-specific human capital characteristics (tenure and training), even though these have a clear productivity effect.Labor market efficiency; wage gap; human capital

Bidding for Investment Projects: Smart Public Policy or Corporate Welfare?

Recently, several governments in Canada have shown an increased willingness to subsidize private investment projects, especially in the manufacturing sector, to the dismay of tax conservatives. I evaluate under what circumstances these government subsidies make sense, paying particular attention to interjurisdictional competition. I show what governments should expect to pay when they join a bidding war and derive the expected welfare gain. The analysis looks in detail at the efforts of the Ontario and federal governments to attract new investments in the automobile sector.Foreign Direct Investment; government competition; subsidies; investment incentives; automobile industry; opportunity cost

Disaggregate Productivity Comparisons: Sectoral Convergence in OECD Countries

International comparisons of productivity have used exchange rates or purchasing power parity (PPP) to make output comparable across countries. While aggregate PPP holds well in the long run, sectoral deviations are very persistent. It raises the need for a currency conversion factor at the same level of aggregation as the output that is compared. Mapping prices from household expenditure surveys into the industrial classification of sectors and adjusting for taxes and international trade, I obtain an expenditure-based sector-specific PPP. Using detailed price data for 1985, 1990, 1993, and 1996, I test whether the sectoral PPPs adequately capture differential changes in relative prices between countries. For agriculture and the majority of industrial sectors, but not for most service sectors, sectoral PPP is preferred over aggregate PPP. Using the most appropriate conversion factor for each industry, productivity convergence is found to be taking place in all but a few industries for a group of 14 OECD countries. The results are robust to the base year used for the currency conversion.PPP; sectoral comparison; base year

Wages Equal Productivity. Fact or Fiction?

If labor markets operated entirely frictionless, productivity premiums associated with different worker characteristics would equal the wage premiums earned by workers possessing those characteristics. Using matched employer-employee data from the manufacturing sector of three sub-Saharan countries, we evaluate to what extent the two premiums differ for four characteristics that are clearly related to human capital: schooling, training, experience, and tenure. Equality holds strongly and even surprisingly well for firms in Zimbabwe (the most developed country in the sample), but not at all in Tanzania (the least developed country), while results in Kenya are intermediate. Where equality fails, the pattern is for general human capital characteristics (schooling, experience) to receive a wage return that exceeds the productivity return, while the reverse applies to more firm-specific human capital characteristics (training, tenure). Schooling tends to be over-rewarded, even though large productivity gains are consistently associated with formal employee training programs. Wages tend to rise with experience, while productivity gains are mostly associated with tenure. We demonstrate the remarkable robustness of the findings controlling, among other things, for sampling errors, nonlinear effects, and non-wage benefits. Localized labor markets and imperfect substitutability of different worker-types provide a partial explanations for the estimated gap between the wage and productivity premiums.sub-Saharan Africa; production function; labor market; human capital; market efficiency

The Effect of Technology Choice on Automobile Assembly Plant Productivity

Productivity growth is usually represented by a continuous shift of the production or cost function. In the automobile industry, there is evidence of a more discrete change in the technology. I estimate a structural model of production and technology choice, using a panel of US automobile assembly plants from 1963 to 1996. New decomposition results suggest that plant-level changes, as opposed to compositional effects, are the most important determinant of aggregate productivity growth.

Wage and Productivity Premiums in Sub-Saharan Africa

Using a matched employer-employee data set of manufacturing plants in three sub-Saharan countries, I compare the marginal productivity of different categories of workers with the wages they earn. A methodological contribution is to estimate the firm level production function jointly with the individual level wage equation using a feasible GLS estimator. The additional information of individual workers leads to more precise estimates, especially of the wage premiums, and to a more accurate test. The results indicate that equality holds strongly for the most developed country in the sample (Zimbabwe), but not at all for the least developed country (Tanzania). Moreover, the breakdown in correct remuneration in the two least developed countries follows a distinct pattern. On the one hand, wage premiums exceed productivity premiums for general human capital characteristics (experience and schooling). On the other hand, salaries hardly increase for more firm-specific human capital characteristics (tenure and training), even though these have a clear productivity effect.

Exporting Raises Productivity in Sub-Saharan African Manufacturing Plants

Proponents of trade liberalization argue that it will force firms to produce closer to the production possibility frontier and that the frontier will move out faster. In particular, plants that export will achieve a higher productivity level. However intuitive the argument, empirical evidence is meager. This hypothesis is examined by calculating the effect of export status on productivity for a panel of manufacturing plants in nine African countries. The results indicate that exporters in these countries are more productive, replicating a similar finding for developed countries. More importantly, exporters increase their productivity advantage after entry into the export market. While the first finding can be explained by selection---only the most productive firms engage in exporting---the latter cannot. The results are robust when unobserved productivity differences and self-selection into the export market are controlled for using different econometric methods. Scale economies are shown to be an important channel for the productivity advance. Credit constraints and contract enforcement problems prevent plants that only produce for the domestic market to fully exploit scale economies.

Trade Growth under the African Growth and Opportunity Act

This paper explores whether one of the most important U.S. policies towards Africa of the past few decades achieved its desired result. In 2000, the United States dropped trade restrictions on a broad list of products through the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Since the Act was applied to both countries and products, we estimate the impact with a triple difference-in-differences estimation, controlling for both country and product-level import surges at the time of onset. This approach allows us to better address the ‘endogeneity of policy’ critique of standard difference-in-differences estimation than if either a country or a product-level analysis was performed separately. Despite the fact that the AGOA product list was chosen to not include ‘import-sensitive’ products, and despite the general challenges of transaction costs in African countries, we find that AGOA has a large and robust impact on apparel imports into the U.S., as well as on the agricultural and manufactured products covered by AGOA. These import responses grew over time and were the largest in product categories where the tariffs removed were large. AGOA did not result in a decrease in exports to Europe in these product categories, suggesting that the U.S.-AGOA imports were not merely diverted from elsewhere. We discuss how the effects vary across countries and the implications of these findings for aggregate export volumes.trade liberalization; sub-Saharan Africa; policy evaluation