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on Efficiency and Productivity |
| By: | Nikulina, Yulia; Jaghdani, Tinoush Jamali; Götz, Linde; Petrick, Martin |
| Abstract: | The impact of state subsidies on Russia's post-Soviet dairy output remains controversial; this study provides an empirical analysis of that relationship. Using an unbalanced panel dataset of 123 dairy enterprises in the Leningrad Region spanning the period from 2010 to 2023, we employ stochastic frontier analysis to assess these relationships. The results indicate that subsidies have a positive effect on dairy enterprise productivity, while their impact on technical efficiency cannot be clearly identified. Notably, the positive effect of subsidies is confined to a medium range of subsidy levels. The influence of different types of subsidies on productivity is multidirectional, as plant production and investment interest subsidies are associated with productivity gains, whereas breeding subsidies have a negative effect, and other subsidy types show no significant impact. Although our results suggest that milk production in Russia could be further increased through improvements in technical efficiency, the findings also indicate that distributing subsidies to a larger number of enterprises is more effective than allocating large subsidies to a limited number of recipients. Furthermore, the results suggest that dairy subsidy policy should be adjusted in favor of more decoupled and regionally differentiated subsidies at the district level. |
| Keywords: | Livestock Production/Industries |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:eaae25:412821 |
| By: | Niki Barbas; Anna Valero; John Van Reenen |
| Abstract: | We compare standard productivity estimates of UK output per worker derived from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) with newly released estimates based on more reliable "Real Time Information" (RTI) administrative data. LFS-based productivity measures have been flat since 2024 Q3, a continuation of disappointing longer-term trends since the Global Financial Crisis. By contrast, RTI-based productivity estimates point to a meaningful productivity pickup. Between 2024 Q3 and 2026 Q2, our baseline administrative estimates indicate that productivity increased by 2.8 per cent, compared with just 0.3 per cent under the LFS-based measure. A divergence in labour input explains these differences. While some of the divergence could in principle reflect definitional and coverage differences between survey and administrative data, we believe that it is due to sampling challenges affecting the LFS, particularly during and since the pandemic. Given that administrative data currently provide the most reliable measure of employee growth, productivity estimates using such data provide a more accurate picture of recent developments. |
| Date: | 2026–08–24 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:cepops:77 |
| By: | Alexandra-Anca Purcel (Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai) |
| Abstract: | This study explores the effect of environmental protection effort, both the adoption and the size of environmental protection expenditure, as well as the energy dependence on total factor productivity (TFP) at the firm level. To this end, I focus on an extended sample of Romanian firms observed during the period 2020–2023. The results, consistent across different specifications, indicate that firms engaged in environmental protection activities have, on average, higher TFP than similar firms but that environmental protection expenditures induce additional costs, negatively influencing TFP. Moreover, energy intensity has a positive and significant effect on TFP. Overall, these findings provide important insights into the relationship between these indicators at the firm level and may lead to the development and improvement of more tailored associated policies. |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:boc:carp26:09 |
| By: | Frank, Luis |
| Abstract: | Sectoral elasticities of labor and capital and the aggregate total factor productivity (TFP) of the Argentine economy are estimated over the period 2016–2025, drawing on the Income Generation Account of the System of National Accounts. A key challenge is the treatment of mixed income corresponding to small firms and self-employed workers, for which factor endowments are not directly observed. We propose a two-stage procedure. First, labor elasticities of medium and large firms are recovered from the observed wage bill and gross operating surplus; endowments of small firms are then imputed using a correction factor that incorporates an exogenous wage gap and employment ratios. Second, a regression model (OLS and IWLS) is estimated on the resulting factor intensities to obtain mean sectoral capital elasticities and a time series of aggregate TFP at current prices. Capital elasticities are highest in transport and communications, agriculture, and real-estate activities, and lowest in public administration and domestic service. The electricity, gas and water sector yields a near-zero capital elasticity, likely reflecting tariff freezes and goverment subsidy effects. Aggregate TFP exhibits a procyclical pattern—rising until 2018, collapsing during the 2020–2021 pandemic, and recovering thereafter—although most year-to-year differences relative to 2016 are not statistically significant. Because the estimates are constructed at current prices, the residual incorporates relative-price movements as well as pure productivity changes. |
| Keywords: | total factor productivity; sectoral elasticities; Income Generation Account; Cobb-Douglas production function; mixed income; Argentina |
| JEL: | D24 O47 O54 |
| Date: | 2026–09–17 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:131075 |
| By: | Margit Molnar; Serdar Sengul; Christian Gréus |
| Abstract: | Bulgaria has successfully liberalised its economy and integrated into global value chains, creating jobs and raising incomes. However, businesses face long-standing challenges of low productivity. Catching up has been steady but a productivity gap with the more advanced economies remains. This paper calculates labour productivity and estimates total factor productivity based on Bulgarian micro data for 2018-23 collected by the National Statistical Institute of Bulgaria and Orbis for international comparison. Bulgarian firms in some manufacturing industries such as garments or manufacturing of machinery and equipment are less productive than other countries in the greater region, while they are more productive in some services, such as computer programming. As expected, larger and foreign firms, exporters and those located in the region around Sofia are more productive. The paper estimates markups to assess competitive pressures, and such estimates are very high in a few manufacturing industries, such as pharmaceuticals and transport equipment, and a large number of service industries such as utilities, trade of vehicles, accommodation and commerce, raising concerns about the level of competition in those markets. |
| Keywords: | competition, markups, productivity, TFP |
| JEL: | D24 D43 L11 L25 |
| Date: | 2026–09–30 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:oec:ecoaaa:1876-en |
| By: | Ronit Mukherji (Ashoka University); Alejandro Rojas-Bernal (University of Hawaii) |
| Abstract: | How does productivity evolve at the microeconomic level, and how does that evolution shape aggregate risk? Using restricted-use plant--product data from India's Annual Survey of Industries (2010-11 to 2022-23), we construct annual physical-output Solow-residual growth accounting for markups, inventories, and heterogeneous input costs. Productivity growth is sharply peaked and fat-tailed, with nonlinear mean reversion that varies with producer size. Larger producers recover more strongly after adverse shocks and retain more of their favorable gains-the Daedalian level effect-yet their shocks extend farther into both tails conditional on entry. Smaller producers exhibit sharper reversals after large favorable shocks-Icarian fallout. We capture these patterns with a three-regime Markov normal mixture conditioned on productivity history and size. Our law of motion yields the distribution of aggregate technology growth. Relative to a size-dependent Gaussian distribution, our regime model has lower aggregate dispersion but substantially thicker standardized tails and raises the probability of an aggregate technology contraction from 0.05% to 0.31%. Removing size dependence while retaining three regimes instead lowers expected growth and raises contraction probability to 2.47%. These separately estimated alternatives show that nonnormality and size dependence have distinct implications for aggregate risk. Granularity is distributional: aggregation weights determine whose shocks matter; productivity dynamics determine the risks they carry. |
| Keywords: | Firm productivity dynamics, aggregate productivity risk, non-Gaussian productivity shocks, production networks, granular fluctuations, firm-size heterogeneity, physical-output productivity |
| JEL: | C46 D22 D24 D57 E23 E32 L11 L25 O47 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hai:wpaper:202604 |
| By: | Gaetano Basso (Bank of Italy); Mithali R. Mathur (University of California-Davis); Giovanni Peri (University of California-Davis, NBER) |
| Abstract: | OECD countries experienced declining native population growth and rising net immigration over 1990-2024. We compile a new dataset of net immigration rates to OECD countries from all origins and show that most of the increase came from non-OECD countries and was predominantly high-skilled. Push factors, network effects, and policy indices explain little of the large cross-country heterogeneity in immigration dynamics; unexpected shocks and surges were common. Using local projections and several sources of identifying variation, we then estimate the relationship between immigration and growth in GDP per capita, labor productivity, capital investment, and total factor productivity (TFP). Immigration from non-OECD countries was a significant predictor of GDP per worker growth, primarily through higher investment. High-skilled immigration, in particular, was associated with stronger human capital accumulation, faster TFP growth, and greater capital deepening. Native population growth, by contrast, had no or weakly negative effects on GDP per capita and productivity. These results are consistent with a large literature documenting the positive productivity and growth effects of immigration, especially high-skilled immigration. |
| Keywords: | OECD economies, immigration, population change, immigration policies, push-driven shift share, labor productivity, TFP, investment, human capital |
| JEL: | F22 O47 J61 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_1054_26 |
| By: | Omer Siddique (Pakistan Institute of Development Economics) |
| Abstract: | The chronically low productivity in Pakistan is due to structural issues. Rather than improving productivity, economic growth in Pakistan has historically relied on factor accumulation rather than productivity growth. Total factor productivity (TFP) growth in Pakistan has been on a declining trend since the 1970s, except for a few years, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. Pakistan undertook liberalization and deregulation policies during these decades, which shows that productivity outcomes respond to policy. At the sectoral level, productivity of the services sector and technology-based activities is higher than that of manufacturing and agriculture, both of which have historically enjoyed protection and various incentives. More alarmingly, however, the sectors that have been designated export-oriented often show low or negative TFP growth. It implies that a protectionist regime has a high cost in terms of lower productivity and lower exports. The macroeconomic literature on productivity shows that trade openness, financial sector depth, and macroeconomic stability are the primary determinants of productivity growth in Pakistan. On the other hand, IMF programs, which come with stringent conditionalities, and infrastructure dampen productivity growth. At the firm level, using ICT, skills, competition, and quality certification are the main determinants of productivity growth. The main message of the research on productivity by the World Bank, IMF, PIDE, and SBP is that resource misallocation, regulatory burden, and weak capabilities hamper productivity and economic growth in Pakistan. Addressing these constraints requires a coordinated and firm reform effort. Any reform effort must focus on the removal of distortionary regulatory and energy-sector bottlenecks in the short term, institutional strengthening in state-owned enterprises, agriculture, and services in the medium term, and investment in human capital, R&D, and global value chain integration in the long t... |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pid:kbrief:2026:150 |
| By: | Ibadoghlu, Gubad |
| Abstract: | Azerbaijan's oil revenues are conventionally understood as a function of two variables: production volume and world oil price. This article shows that this two-factor model is no longer sufficient to explain the country's fiscal trajectory. During the first half of 2026, Azerbaijan's oil and gas revenues continued to decline even as global oil prices rose sharply amid instability in the Strait of Hormuz - a combination the standard model cannot account for. Drawing on a sixteen-year dataset (2010-H1 2026) covering national production, price, and revenue, together with field-level data for the BP-operated Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG) block and SOCAR's own operations, the article identifies two structural forces operating beneath the price-and-volume surface: a sustained decline in the capital efficiency of ACG's investment (output generated per dollar of capital and operating expenditure) and a parallel decline in the drilling productivity of SOCAR's own fields (output generated per metre drilled). Both indicators point to the same underlying phenomenon, field maturation, but through different mechanisms and with different implications for producers, regulators, and fiscal planners. The article concludes that continued reliance on price and volume alone as explanatory variables for Azerbaijan's oil revenue trajectory will systematically misstate the country's fiscal outlook, and it proposes a set of institutional and technical responses to the productivity decline documented here. |
| Keywords: | Azerbaijan, ACG, SOCAR, SOFAZ, oil production, oil revenues, oil price, well productivity, capital efficiency, opex, capex, petroleum economics, resource depletion |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:esprep:343302 |
| By: | Valerio Astuti; Daniele Piras |
| Abstract: | We present a comprehensive description of the network of Italian Business-to-Business commercial relationships, based on the universe of electronic invoices collected by the Italian Tax Office. The firm-to-firm detail of the data is exploited to describe the distribution of the numbers of buyers (customers) and sellers (suppliers) per firm, the centrality of each firm in the production network, and the average distance between firms. We characterize for the first time the firm-to-firm network describing the Italian production system, and present its geographic and sectoral breakdown. The analysis reveals heavy tailed distributions for the numbers of buyers and sellers per firm, implying a scale-free structure of the network. The distributions of centrality values display heavy tails as well, indicating a strong concentration of importance in a relatively small number of firms. We estimate the tail exponents for all these distributions, finding in all cases lower exponents for downstream (buyer-side) distributions than for the upstream (seller-side) ones. |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2609.10227 |
| By: | Matteo Sartori (Bank of Italy); Marco Guido Palladino (Banque de France, IZA); Eliana Viviano (Bank of Italy) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines how Italian firms use fixed-term contracts (FTCs) and documents the relative importance of seasonal needs, worker screening and buffer-stock motives. Using matched employer–employee data for 2013–2017 merged with firm-level balance-sheet information, we select a set of firms that systematically rely on temporary employment, generating over 85 per cent of its total volume. By focusing on these firms, we show that two ex ante contract features - the seasonal label and the initial duration - are highly informative about firms' hiring intentions. Use of seasonal contracts is limited and concentrated in a narrow set of sectors, while longer initial durations strongly predict conversion into permanent jobs, reflecting screening behaviour driven mainly by firm-specific factors. In contrast, most FTCs are short, non-seasonal and concentrated in firms dealing with lower productivity and higher revenue volatility, consistent with buffer-stock adjustment. A clustering exercise confirms that about 10 per cent of firms predominantly use seasonal contracts, one fourth use FTCs for screening, and roughly 65 per cent rely on them to manage uncertainty. |
| Keywords: | fixed-term contracts, screening, contract conversions, seasonal workers, productivity |
| JEL: | J23 J41 J63 L23 |
| Date: | 2026–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdi:wptemi:td_1543_26 |
| By: | Pinar Tat (Department of Economics, Gebze Technical University); Sebnem Sahin (UNDP Eurasia); Abdullah Altun (Department of Economics, Gebze Technical University); Halit Yanikkaya (Department of Economics, Gebze Technical University) |
| Abstract: | This study examines the existence of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions leakage within the framework of global value chains (GVCs) by comparing production-based and consumption-based accounting. We contribute to the literature by applying the most recent value-added decomposition methodology developed by Wang et al. (2017) and by using sector-level data from 186 countries across 25 sectors for the period 1990-2023. Our descriptive evidence demonstrates substantial differences between PBE and CBE and reveals the existence of emissions leakage across countries and sectors. Developing countries and upstream sectors appear as net exporters of emissions, while developed countries and downstream sectors emerge as net importers through global value chains. The empirical results demonstrate that GVC participation plays a central role in shaping this difference. The forward GVC participation is positively associated with net emission exports, whereas backward GVC participation is positively related to net emission imports. These findings highlight that emission responsibility cannot be adequately assessed using production-based measures alone. Instead, effective policies should account for consumption-based measures to reach an equitable responsibility-sharing framework in an increasingly fragmented global economy. |
| Keywords: | Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Leakage, Production and Consumption-Based Accounting, Forward GVC Participation, Backward GVC Participation |
| JEL: | F18 F64 Q56 |
| Date: | 2026–09–14 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:geb:wpaper:2026-02 |