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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.

Productivity growth in the United States slowed dramatically during the Seventies. One measure of total factor productivity growth averaged 2.6 percent from 1948 to 1966, and 1.7 percent from 1966 to 1973, but only 0.2 percent during the 1973–81 period. Other measures of productivity growth show a similar picture. Even after adjusting for the weakness in the economy in 1981—which adds only 0.2 to 0.3 percentage points to the 1973–81 growth rate—the average annual rate of productivity growth during the mid‐ and late Seventies declined over 2 percentage points from the early postwar period, and well over 1 percentage point from the 1966–73 period.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the main “models of growth” characterising the EU countries in the last two decades, with particular reference to the employment‐productivity relationship, and to reveal the key determinants of productivity.

After a survey of the relevant literature, the empirical section analyses the “models of growth” by graphical inspection, identifying four models (for EU‐27 in the 1990‐2008 period): extensive, intensive, virtuous, and stagnant. Then different econometric investigations (beta convergence, dynamic panel with GMM estimation, fixed effects panel, cross‐section) are used to test the “diminishing returns of employment rate” hypothesis (for the 2000‐2006 period), to assess the convergence processes and to determine the key variables affecting productivity.

The main finding is the confirmation of the hypothesis mentioned: high employment growth is likely to lead to slower productivity growth. Moreover, besides verifying the beta convergence of productivity per worker, the most significant determinants of productivity are the following: education, a transition index, some structural indicators, and a “shadow economy” proxy. Finally, the descriptive analysis shows that “old” EU countries, coming from two decades of “jobless growth”, shifted to an “extensive” growth model; in contrast, transition countries (NMS) followed the opposite path: reducing employment and raising productivity.

It would be advisable to extend the period of the analysis, as soon as new data become available.

The main policy implication is to get the EU Lisbon strategy – i.e. to create “more and better” jobs – working effectively.

The most original finding is the clear assessment of an employment‐productivity trade‐off. Also, the different models of growth are categorised simply and effectively.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the factors determining the productivity development in the Asia Pacific countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, China, Japan, Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand.

The extensive growth theory that is expressed as the decomposition of the contribution of changes in employment, physical capital, foreign direct investment (FDI), human capital (HC), telecommunications investment and total factor productivity (TFP) growth on the selected Asia-Pacific countries’ output growth is used in this study. In this respect, an annual time series data over the period 1970-2012 for the aforementioned variables are employed.

The study found that the FDI spillover effects through the TFP are considered as productivity-driven economic growth in which the FDI spillover effects have significant effect on the productivity growth of the majority of these countries. It should be noted that most of these countries showed technological progress through the FDI spillover effects that is translated into a form of technology transfer and HC skills development.

This study empirically compared the FDI spillover effects on sustainable productivity growth of the most growing countries in the Asia Pacific region by using modified extensive growth theory that closed the gaps in the past studies and addressed the issues of technology transfer, HC development and sustainable productivity growth brought by the technical progress in these countries through the FDI spillover effects on productivity growth.

The paper aims to investigate factors that drive the total factor productivity (TFP) and its growth in the Czech food industry over 2003–2017. The authors’ analysis focuses on firm-level characteristics such as location choice, sub-sector affiliation, use of debt, liquidity, asset turnover, firm size and firm age.

The determinants of productivity were tested econometrically by estimation of multivariate regression models. The firm-level panel data set consisted of 14,488 observations (data of 980 firms spanning 15 years). TFP was estimated by three regression-based techniques – ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, instrumental variables (IV) approach and two-way generalized method of moments (GMM) regression. All three measures of TFP were used as outcome variables to estimate the impact of firm-level determinants on both TFP level and growth.

The results have shown statistically significant and reversed U-shaped relationship between the firm age and the TFP level (with a turning point in the age of 12.5 years). However, the dynamic models investigating the TFP growth have found that younger firms achieve higher productivity growth in comparison with older ones. Higher market share and assets turnover were positively associated with both TFP level and its growth.

This study brings several relevant propositions for future research. First, the authors recommend future researchers to study not only differences in the levels of productivity but also determinants of its growth. Second, the authors believe that adding a non-linear component to age as a factor explaining changes in the levels of productivity might be a very relevant contribution to the literature.

Although it is generally accepted that successful and sustainable growth of firms, regions and economies can be achieved particularly through viable companies with high productivity, there is still a limited number of firm-level studies explaining the determinants of productivity levels and growth in agribusiness sectors in transition economies. Therefore, this study is expected to contribute to a better understanding of this important topic.

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.

“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.