Productivity Change in State and Local Governments
提出一个无需直接测量政府产出即可估算公共部门生产率增长率的模型，利用美国1959-1979年季度数据发现生产率年均增长0.50%。
A model is developed in this paper which allows the growth rate of public sector productivity to be estimated without an explicit measure of sectoral output. In this model, communities are regarded as generalized households, and the goods and services provided by the community's government are interpreted as internally produced household goods. The model is then fitted to quarterly data from the U. S. National Income and Product Accounts, and the rate of productivity change is found to average 0.50% per year for the period 1959-1979. THE sources-of-growth approach to productivity measurement distinguishes between the growth in real output due to the growth in factor inputs-capital, labor, materials-and the growth in output due to advances in technology, managerial practice, and other factors related to productive efficiency.' The former are collectively associated with the movement along an aggregate or sectoral production function, while the latter are associated with the shift in that function.2 In practice, the shift in the production function is measured by the residual real output not attributed to the growth of the share-weighted inputs, and termed total factor The sources-of-growth model is based on the underlying assumption that real output and real input can be measured with a reasonable degree of accuracy. While this presumption is correct for many types of economic activity, it is essentially incorrect for those sectors which produce services. As Kendrick (1982) has recently noted, approximately one-third of the real gross product originating in the service sector of U.S. private business economy is estimated using employment, manhours, or labor earnings. Such procedures systematically misstate the true growth of real output, and thus systematically bias the estimated growth in total factor productivity. The situation is even worse in the public sector: in the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts, the output of general government is defined to be equal to labor input, implying that the growth of total factor productivity exactly offsets the effect of nonlabor inputs. A model is developed in this paper which allows the growth rate of public sector productivity to be estimated without an explicit measure of sectoral output. In this model, communities are regarded as generalized households, and the goods and services provided by the community's government are interpreted as internally produced household goods. This interpretation allows us to appropriate the analytical apparatus of the household production model, and thereby permits us to estimate the key parameters of the model-including a government total factor productivity parameter-without first having to measure the output of the govern-