Search results

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to investigate the existence of different degrees of returns to scale in low-tech and high-tech manufacturing industries; and to examine whether the degrees of returns to scale change through time.

The empirical investigation implemented in the paper uses data from the EU KLEMS Database, covering a sample of 12 manufacturing industries in 11 OECD countries over the period 1976-2006. The investigation employed two different estimation methods: instrumental variables and system GMM. The robustness of the results was assessed by employing two different specifications of Kaldor-Verdoorn’s Law, by using lags and five-year averages to smooth business-cycle fluctuations, and by dividing the sample into two time periods.

The results reported in the paper provide strong evidence in support of the hypothesis of substantial increasing returns to scale in manufacturing. The investigation suggests that high-tech manufacturing industries exhibit larger degrees of returns to scale than low-tech manufacturing industries. Finally, the analysis revealed also that the magnitude of the returns to scale in manufacturing have increased in the last decades, driven by increases in the magnitude of returns to scale observed in high-tech industries.

No previous work has assessed the hypothesis that increasing returns to scale vary according to the technological content of industries. Moreover, no previous work has used system GMM or data from EU KLEMS to test Kaldor-Verdoorn’s Law. Most importantly, the findings of the paper present new evidence on the degree of returns to scale in high-tech and low-tech manufacturing industries.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the long-term relationship between the performance of the manufacturing sector and economic growth in Saudi Arabia. It does so by testing Kaldor–Verdoorn and Thirlwall’s laws.

The authors used data for the period 1980–2014 from databases of the World Bank, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, the Penn World Table (PWT8) and the five-year plan of the Ministry of Planning and National Economy of Saudi Arabia. The authors used the bound test for the cointegration approach, which allowed them to test the two hypotheses in the long run, after examining the stability of the time series and ensuring the rank of its stability.

The results that emerged from the analysis show that Kaldor’s law is applicable to the data on the KSA, but with decreasing returns to scale, with coefficient equal 0.83. Verdoorn’s law is also applicable at both macro and sectoral levels with elasticity coefficient equal to 0.81 and 0.616, respectively, also with decreasing returns to scale. For Thirlwall’s model, the results show that the relationship was reverse, contrary to what expected, with a significant elasticity coefficient of 0.599.

This study recommends that policy makers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia focus on the industrial sector because of its impact on productivity, social returns and other sectors of the economy.

One of the important aspects of this paper is that it tests both Kaldor–Verdoorn’s and Thirlwall’s laws in the case of countries that depend on oil exports for growth and where the contribution of industrial output to GDP, in Saudi Arabia, is relatively low, at about 13 percent, across the period 1970–2013, and about 16.8 percent between 2000 and 2013 (see Figure 1). Since there have been few studies on this subject, the authors used data from Saudi Arabia to provide evidence of the importance of diversifying the economy by increasing the contribution of manufacturing to GDP to ensure increased productivity and to promote economic growth.

The aim of this study is to investigate the validity of the Kaldor-Verdoorn's law in explaining the long-run determinants of the labor productivity growth for the manufacturing sector of some developed economies (Western European Countries, Australia, Canada, Japan and the USA).

The authors consider the period 1973-2006 using data provided by the European Commission – Economics and Financial Affairs. The method is instrumental variable. The robustness of estimates is checked by means of the Chow and the CUSUM and CUSUMQ tests. The authors consider the traditional specification of the dynamic Verdoorn law and the one which also includes investment to output ratio (I/Y), as a proxy of the capital growth rate, and the average labor cost growth, as a proxy of supply factors.

The findings suggest that the law is valid for the manufacturing as countries show increasing returns to scale. Capital growth and labor cost growth do not appear important in explaining productivity growth. The estimated Verdoorn coefficients are found to be substantially stable throughout the period.

The authors consider the most recent years, which has been characterized by a constant decline in the average GDP growth rates; a productivity growth decline; the long-term reduction in the manufacturing share of total employment. The authors examine the importance of alternative hypotheses such as those related to the existence of supply constraints. The authors check the stability of the KVL throughout the period under the consideration and across countries. The authors evaluate whether, in the case of the developed countries, economies of scale are significant.

This paper studies one of the most paradoxical facts of the Spanish economic growth during the period 1982–2007: high growth of investment and aggregate demand accompanied by the stagnation of labor productivity, especially from 1994.

The authors propose two hypotheses: first, that the productive structure neutralized the mechanisms that link investment with productivity, essentially due to the low capital efficiency of the job-creating sectors (JCs); and consequently, investment drove production almost exclusively through employment, generating a trade-off between employment and productivity.

The econometric results find evidence in favor of both hypotheses applying a time-series methodology (ARIMA) to EU KLEMS data for a period of 25 years and 25 industries of the Spanish economy.

The first contribution of this paper is to offer an interpretation of the phenomenon from a perspective that combines elements of productive supply and aggregate demand, representing a novel contribution to the specialized literature. In addition, the authors show how the Kaldor-Verdoorn law could be neutralized due to employment creation (Okun's law) and the presence of a productivity-employment trade-off.

This study aims to contribute to the current and well-documented phenomenon of hysteresis in the US economy after the Great Financial Recession. Compelling reasons lead me to believe that Verdoorn's law can be used to explain this phenomenon by relating hysteresis to a fall in the size of returns to scale of the whole economy.

Verdoorn's law is estimated using a time-varying regression model that employs Bayesian methods to examine the evolution of the Verdoorn coefficient. The investigation uses a bivariate time-varying model to estimate long-run growth rates of output and productivity while controlling for potential endogeneity problems.

The study finds substantial variation in the Verdoorn coefficient across time as well as a significant fall of it in the onset of the Great Financial Recession, which confirms the presence of hysteresis in the US economy. Additionally, it also finds a fall in the size of productivity shocks, and in the long-run growth rates of output and productivity according to previous studies.

The empirical investigation uses, novel to the literature on Verdoorn's law to date, a bivariate time-varying regression model with stochastic volatility. It also employs quarterly productivity data for a considerably long period, which to my knowledge, has not been used by previous works. Most importantly, this approach contemplates positive hysteresis––typically neglected––which provides a less bleak panorama.

The neo-Kaleckian model follows the ideas of Marx, Keynes and Kalecki, that investment is a key influencing factor in the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. Through the discussion of different forms of investment decision function, this paper constructs the analysis framework of wage-led and profit-led economic growth regimes.

The model has become an important theoretical paradigm for current Western heterodox economists regarding the research on the impact of functional income distribution on economic growth, and it has a very large impact on both theoretical and empirical research. Starting from Marx's reproduction theory, this article discusses the theoretical shortcomings of the neo-Kaleckian growth regime model.

This paper mainly focuses on three aspects: (1) the ideological legacy of “Smith's Dogma”; (2) neglecting the restrictions on income distribution from the organic composition of capital and the surplus value rate; (3) technological progress and the formation of a new long economic wave.

The authors believe that the neo-Kaleckian model unilaterally emphasizes the demand-side factors in the economy and, unconsciously or not, ignores the role of the supply-side, which makes it encounter certain limitations in explaining long-term growth. Even if some empirical conclusions are employed to bridge functional income distribution and technological progress, there is still a lack of a theoretical basis for accurately describing long-term economic changes using this model. In order to better promote high-quality economic development and accelerate the formation of a new pattern of economic development in which the domestic large-scale cycle is the mainstay and the domestic and international double cycles promote each other, the authors need to adopt a policy combination with the supply-side as the main and the demand-side as the supplement, and to work from both sides.