Search results for "Capital deepening"
showing 8 items of 8 documents
The devil is in the details : Capital stock estimation and aggregate productivity growth : an application to the Spanish economy
2020
The variables that contribute to explaining the major puzzles and paradoxes in macroeconomics and economic growth literature always appear related, directly or indirectly, to capital stock and depreciation. Depreciation defined in a narrow sense refers only to physical wear and tear, but in a broader sense, it also includes economic deterioration and obsolescence. In this study, we explore the link between these two depreciation concepts, the capital deepening and total factor productivity (TFP) growth. We propose a double growth accounting framework that allows us to establish a relationship between variables in statistical terms and variables in economic terms. Then, with Spanish data for…
Human capital in OECD countries: Technical change, efficiency and productivity
2003
The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of human capital in the productivity gains of the OECD countries in the period 1965-90, breaking down the productivity gains into technical change and gains in efficiency. For this purpose we use both a stochastic frontier approach and a non-parametric approach (DEA) and calculate Malmquist indices of productivity. The results obtained indicate the existence of both a level effect (a higher level of human capital raises labour productivity) and a rate effect (a higher level of human capital affects positively the rate of technical change) associated with human capital. The differences among countries in endowments of human capital have worked aga…
Labour Market Regulations and Capital Intensity
2018
What is the impact of labour market regulations as measured by the OECD indicator of employment protection legislation (EPL) on capital and skill composition? Precisely, this study investigates the effects of changes in EPL on changes in four types of capital and three components of labour skill. They include construction, non-ICT, ICT, and R&D capital components on the one hand, and low-, medium-, and highly-skilled labour on the other. Our analysis is grounded on a large country–industry panel dataset of fourteen OECD countries, and eighteen manufacturing and market service industries, from 1988 to 2007. It shows that strengthening EPL lowers ICT capital and, even more severely, R&…
Channels through Which Human Capital Inequality Influences Economic Growth
2011
This paper empirically investigates the theoretical predictions of some of the channels through which human capital inequality may discourage investment and growth. In a cross section of countries over the period 1960–2000, findings reveal that, all other things being equal, a greater degree of human capital inequality increases fertility rates and reduces life expectancy, which in turn hampers the accumulation rates of human capital. This effect is reinforced in the countries where individuals find it difficult to access credit. Extensive sensitivity analyses show that the results are robust across specifications and are not driven by atypical observations, endogenous regressors, or unobse…
Endogenous Growth, Capital Utilization and Depreciation
2004
We study the one sector model of growth when a linear production technology is combined with adjustment costs and a technology for capital maintenance. Agents are allowed to under-use the installed capital and to vary the depreciation rate. This economy decides endogenously how much resources devotes to the accumulation of new capital and how much to maintenance and repair activities. We find as striking results that the long-run depreciation and capital utilization rates are positively related to the population growth rate, and that both depend negatively on the intial conditions. The long-run growth rate appears positively correlated with the depreciation rate.
Throwing the Spanner in the Works: The Mixed Blessing of FDI
2014
FDI is generally attributed to have positive impact for developing countries. In contrast, this paper shows that foreign capital inflows may cause an economy to be stuck in a middle-income trap. Introducing a simple capital market imperfection into a standard neoclassical (open-economy) model of growth, I show that FDI crowds out domestic investment when countries are still growing. If profitable investments are pursued by foreign capital owners, this does reduce chances for domestic entrepreneurs that they would have otherwise been able to take, by means of economy-wide savings. The long term losses due to the crowding-out effect occur despite the short-term gains that sudden capital inflo…
Understanding Economic Growth in Ghana in Comparative Perspective
2019
Ghana has experienced a decade of solid and exceptionally high growth. Between 2005 and 2015, income nearly doubled. This paper analyzes the factors driving this impressive growth performance, using tools such as structural change decompositions and growth regressions. For the comparative perspective, the paper compares Ghana with its structural and aspirational peers. The paper finds that the contribution of structural change to growth has been limited and attributes this to labor that was freed up in agriculture not being absorbed by high-productivity sectors. Looking at factors that drove growth since 2000, financial development and infrastructure had the most important impacts. A benchm…
Exploring the sources of labour productivity growth and convergence in the Italian regions: some evidence from a production frontier approach
2009
This paper investigates labour productivity growth and regional convergence patterns in Italy over the time span 1982–2000. Starting from some evidence of spatial polarisation within Italian economy, the analysis aims at exploring the sources of this tendency. To this end, an approach based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) production frontiers is employed which allows to decompose labour productivity growth into efficiency change, technological progress and capital deepening, looking then at the relative contribution of each component to regional convergence. Moreover, some measures of human capital and public capital are used as augmentation factors of the conventional inputs. The study …