Measuring productivity growth when technological change is biased?a new index and an application to UK agriculture
提出一种调整传统全要素生产率指数的方法,通过潜变量方法测量技术变革偏向,解决传统指数在技术非中性时混淆要素积累与技术变革效应的问题。应用于英国农业(1953-2000年),发现传统指数严重低估生产率增长。
Productivity growth is conventionally measured by indices representing discreet approximations of the Divisia TFP index under the assumption that technological change is Hicks-neutral. When this assumption is violated, these indices are no longer meaningful because they conflate the effects of factor accumulation and technological change. We propose a way of adjusting the conventional TFP index that solves this problem. The method adopts a latent variable approach to the measurement of technical change biases that provides a simple means of correcting product and factor shares in the standard Tornqvist-Theil TFP index. An application to UK agriculture over the period 1953-2000 demonstrates that technical progress is strongly biased. The implications of that bias for productivity measurement are shown to be very large, with the conventional TFP index severely underestimating productivity growth. The result is explained primarily by the fact that technological change has favoured the rapidly accumulating factors against labour, the factor leaving the sector. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.