Accounting for Cross‐Country Differences in Output Per Worker: A Sectoral CES Perspective
采用要素偏向型技术的CES生产结构，重新审视了若各国拥有相同技术菜单，人均产出差异是否会缩小。研究发现，对整体市场部门而言差异几乎不会缩小，但不同子部门结果差异显著。
ABSTRACT The standard macroeconomic literature suggests that richer countries employ more productive technologies. Removing technological disparities between countries would hence narrow the substantial variation in output per worker across countries. But technology is factor‐neutral in this standard development accounting approach, which is at odds with important macroeconomic frameworks and empirical results. We hence develop a CES production structure with factor‐biased technologies and revisit the question: how much would the variation in output per worker across countries narrow if all countries had access to the same menu of production technologies? Our results for the aggregate market sector suggest: probably not at all. But there are remarkable differences for this result across five subsectors. We use those to illustrate that our presumably surprising finding results from an interplay of complementary production factors, factor bias of technologies, and the menu of available technologies.