Boyle, Gerry and McQuinn, Kieran (2003) Why do some countries produce so much more output per worker than others? - A note. UNSPECIFIED. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

In an important paper, Hall and Jones (1990) show that internatinal differences in output per worker across 127 countries in 1988 are fundamentally determined by variations in, what they term, a country's "social infrastructure". This paper conducts a robustness check of their findings by implementing a testing framework that is radically different to their approach. Specifically, we extimate a stochastic, rather than a deterministic, production frontier and we also model the potential role of social infrastructure in explaining productivity in a single step, rather thatn the statistically unsatisfactory two-step method used by Hall and Jones. We obtain two important findings that are strongly supportive of Hall and Jones' results. First, the bulk of inter-country variation in output per worker is accounted for by differences in productivity. Second, social infrastructure is found to be a highly significant variable in explaining inter-country productivity differences

Item Type:	Other
Additional Information:	N133/11/03
Keywords:	Productivity, Social Infrastructure, Stochastic Production Frontier.
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Economics, Finance and Accounting
Item ID:	128
Depositing User:	Ms Sandra Doherty
Date Deposited:	09 Dec 2003
Refereed:	No
URI:
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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