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The purpose of this paper is to investigate determinants of regional disparities in China's agricultural labor productivity growth.

This paper first decomposes the regional disparity in China's agricultural productivity growth into its components: technical change, efficiency change and input accumulation per worker. The convergence test is also used to analyze the determinants of regional disparity.

The paper finds that during 1987 and 2005, although the growth of China's agricultural labor productivity mainly depended on the accumulation of inputs, technical changes contributed more to regional disparities in agricultural productivity growth.

This paper, which studies the determinants of regional disparities in China's agricultural labor productivity growth, contributes to a better understanding of China's agricultural growth and how to reduce the regional inequality. It is indicated that improving efficiency to promote total factor productivity growth is important for agricultural labor productivity growth for the three regions – Eastern, Central and Western – of China. The increase in inputs for Western China, and the improvement in technical change for Central and Western China are significant aspects to promote the growth of agricultural productivity and narrow the gap with Eastern China.

This paper aims to analyse the pattern of structural transformation and productivity growth of 15 major Indian states at a ten-sector level of disaggregation from 1983 to 2017.

The analysis has been carried over in a ten-sector disaggregated level through construction of the labour and output data from various micro data sets.

The majority of Indian states have bypassed the stage of industrialization, wherein labour previously engaged in agriculture has transitioned directly into the modern services sector while skipping the manufacturing. There are no sign of convergence of sectoral productivities and the heterogeneity among Indian states persists throughout the time period. The growth performance of states are not positively associated with the movement of labour across sectors as measured by the structural transformation index (STI). This goes against the narrative that structural transformation help reduce the misallocation of factors. Despite an increase in educational attainment of workers across all sectors, more than one-third of agricultural workers still remain either illiterate or lack formal schooling. Among sectors, construction (C) and trade, hotels and restaurants (THR) have absorbed the majority of workers who have left agricultural jobs. Finance, insurance, real estate and business services (FIRB), electricity, gas and water supply (EGWS) and mining and quarrying (MQ) are the three sectors that have seen significant gains in labour productivity during the study period.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to analyse structural change and productivity growth in the Indian economy using Indian states as critical geographical marker. The results are new and add value to the literature.

This paper explores the pattern of technical change in the Korean economy from 1970 to 2013 and investigates its determinants. We use the Classical growth-distribution schedule to show that the labor-saving and capital-using pattern has predominated. For the rationale behind this Marx-biased technical change, we focus on the relationship between technical change and real wage growth via the evolution of labor and capital productivity, and verify the historical direction of technical change against the rise and fall of the working class. Furthermore, we find that the deviation during the post-crisis period from the long-run trend of Marx-biased technical change is not attributable to the vitality of new technological innovations, but rather the reflection of class dynamics over extracting productivity under weaker capital deepening. The results suggest that the recent deterioration of labor share and labor unions in Korea is closely associated with low incentive for technological progress, which contributes to prolonged stagnation.

“It should also be noted that the objective of convergence and equal distribution, including across under-performing areas, can hinder efforts to generate growth. Contrariwise, the objective of competitiveness can exacerbate regional and social inequalities, by targeting efforts on zones of excellence where projects achieve greater returns (dynamic major cities, higher levels of general education, the most advanced projects, infrastructures with the heaviest traffic, and so on). If cohesion policy and the Lisbon Strategy come into conflict, it must be borne in mind that the former, for the moment, is founded on a rather more solid legal foundation than the latter” European Commission (2005, p. 9)Adaptation of Cohesion Policy to the Enlarged Europe and the Lisbon and Gothenburg Objectives.

Uses a model of technical change embodied in capital equipment to analyse average labour productivity growth. Determinants of productivity growth identified in this analysis are: (1) the rate of labour‐saving technical change; (2) the differential in the rates of change of wages and the rental price of capital; and (3) the rate of growth of industry productive capacity. Finds evidence that each of the identified factors has a positive and statistically significant relationship to average labour productivity growth in a cross‐section of Australian manufacturing industries.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the drivers of firm’s growth such as research and development (R & D), absorptive capacity, knowledge management, organisation culture, access to finance, internationalisation and so forth. As far as the contribution is concerned, two objectives have been achieved from this empirical paper. First, this paper fills an important gap in the literature by determining the drivers of firm’s growth. Second, this study analysed the Pakistani software industry at micro level by investigating the firm’s knowledge-based assets and their significant association with labour productivity growth. Based on a face to face interview of 69 software firms, this study found that firm size, access to finance, internationalisation (exporting and outward foreign direct investment), business improvement methods and knowledge management have a positive impact on the firm’s labour productivity growth. In comparison, firm undertaking R & D and absorptive capacity showed negative association with labour productivity growth. This study implies that these software firms have low investment in knowledge-based assets. In summary, this empirical study suggests that high sunk costs, low investment in knowledge-based assets and shortage of skills generally affect the labour productivity of these software firms.

Survey analysis, using cross section data analysis.

This study found that firm size, access to finance, internationalisation (exporting and outward FDI), business improvement methods and knowledge management have a positive impact on the firm’s labour productivity growth. In comparison, firm undertaking R & D and absorptive capacity showed negative association with labour productivity growth. In summary, this empirical study suggests that high sunk costs, low investment in knowledge-based assets and shortage of skills generally affect the labour productivity of these software firms.

Additionally, suggestions for future research would be to investigate the relationship between drivers of firm growth and innovation performance. The survey analysis could be extended to other parts of country such as Karachi and Lahore for resolving causality.

First, this paper fills an important gap in the literature by determining the drivers of firm’s growth. Second, this study analysed the Pakistani software industry at micro level by investigating the firm’s knowledge-based assets and their significant association with labour productivity growth.

In this paper we investigate why the process of structural change in Brazil was growth accelerating before 1980 and why it was growth reducing after this year.

We investigate the causes of this change in behavior using the shift-share decomposition method.

The results indicate that in the first period there were high productivity gains as result of improvement in economic fundamentals such as the quality of capital and of labor and innovations. In this way, reallocation of workers between sectors, that is part of the process of structural change, was an inducer of economic growth. However, after 1980, mainly between 1991 and 2011, sectors that achieved productivity gains did so by reducing labor, which was absorbed by sectors with poor performance in terms of productivity growth. Furthermore, factors such as the deindustrialization that developed countries have been undergoing, the international situation, the stage of Brazilian economic development and its possible premature deindustrialization contributed to a growth reducing structural change.

Our differential to the matter is applying the shift-share methodology without combining any of the ten sectors analyzed, adopting a slightly different time frame than similar studies and presenting the shift-share results in a graphically manner in addition to the traditional numbers. By representing graphically how much each of the ten sectors is contributing to the structural change in the economy we are emphasizing the specificities of each of these sectors instead of just considering the aggregated view like manufacturing industry versus other industries or modern services versus traditional services.

The aim of this chapter is to determine the relationship between labor productivity and economic development. In this context, the annual data of Turkey on a range of 1970–2017 are included in the study period. On the other hand, these data are tested with the help of Toda Yamamoto causality analysis. Thus, it will be possible to determine whether there is a strong relationship between the two variables. According to the obtained results of the analysis, it is defined that there is a causal relationship from labor productivity to economic growth in Turkey. Based on these results, it can be said that labor productivity should rise in order to increase economic development in Turkey. For this purpose, educational programs in Turkey can be revised with the help of a detailed study. In this process, cooperation with companies to understand the needs in the market plays a key role. Additionally, regulations should also be prepared related to the salaries of the employees. If it can be possible to prevent employees from receiving wages below a certain amount by placing a minimum legal limit on salaries, it will be possible to increase the motivation of the employees. This situation has a positive and significant contribution to the labor productivity.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue on “Labour, productivity and growth”.

The paper discusses the articles in the special issue, which investigate the main theme – labour, productivity and growth – from different points of view by employing a variety of econometric methods. These include improvement of the evaluation of the impact of labour market flexibility on economic performance, analysis of the macroeconomic law of decreasing returns to labour, a new panel co‐integration method, and a reinterpretation of co‐integration analysis to assess the impact of incomes policy. Institutional variables, in particular the system of industrial relations, are duly considered.

The papers in the special issue highlight different causes of sluggish economic (productivity) growth in Europe, in the light of not only traditional macroeconomic variables, such as total factor productivity and labour market flexibility, but also such factors as neo‐corporatist industrial relations and management practices, which are generally neglected in the literature.

The paper introduces a number of articles proposing innovations in the interpretation and application of a wide range of theoretical approaches and econometric methodologies. It also discusses several policy suggestions for fighting sluggish productivity growth, including investment in research and development, human capital, flexicurity, innovative industrial relations practices and high‐performance workplace practices also considered capable of affecting macroeconomic performance.