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The purpose of this paper is to quantitatively evaluate of the current status of productivity management of industrial and non-industrial service companies in Germany. Based on that knowledge, best practices and needs regarding tools and methods can be identified.

In two qualitative pre-studies the theoretical foundation of service productivity was built. Using this knowledge, a quantitative empirical survey was conducted, including almost 2000 service companies. The sampling frame was based on a company database provided by Hoppenstedt. Samples were randomly selected using proportionate stratified sampling.

The findings show the economic importance and meaningfulness of service productivity management, independently from the industry.

Due to the chosen population, the findings are limited to Germany. Furthermore, a more detailed comparison of service industries beyond industrial and non-industrial services was not feasible.

The data contained evidence that companies conducing productivity management are more successful than those who are not. This underlines the economic importance service productivity management.

The paper provides reliable, quantitative insights of the current status, demands, and benefits of service productivity management in the industrial as well as non-industrial sector.

“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.

This study is designed to examine the impact of favorable working environment (FWE) and R&D on manufacturing productivity of labor intensive industries. More specifically, the purpose of this study is to generate quantitative evidence of the effect of FWE and R&D‐based manufacturing process on outputs and productivity.

Convenience sampling method has been used to conduct this study. This method provides the opportunity for selecting those manufacturing industries that are convenient to get access for collecting relevant information. Three categories of labor intensive manufacturing industries such as category A, B and C have been chosen to perform this research. Industrial category A represents the manufacturing operations which are based on skill of labor. Category B is a group of industries which provides the FWE the ability to utilize the potential of skill in the manufacturing process. However, category C is a specialized group of industries and its manufacturing process is dependent on R&D. The operating data of inputs cost and the revenue of corresponding outputs have been gathered from audited documents of the relevant sample industries and the data have been analyzed by using standard statistical techniques in order to establish the relationship between dependent and independent variables.

It is found that the industrial category B has spent about 1 percent of revenue on FWE and gained 9.5 percent higher productivity compare to industrial category A. However, the result has shown that the expenditure on FWE is positively associated with productivity (r<0.5). Whereas, the study has revealed that industrial category C has spent about 1.5 percent of revenue on R&D activities for improving manufacturing process and gained 20 higher productivity compare to industrial category A. Nevertheless, the expenditure on R&D is strongly correlated with productivity (r>0.7). The study concludes that FWE as proxy of job satisfaction of workforce and R&D on manufacturing process are value‐added inputs for labor intensive industries and it is positively associated with manufacturing productivity.

This paper presents three original case studies on labor intensive manufacturing industries. This study has addressed an important issue of labor intensive manufacturing industries and generated quantitative evidence of the impact of FWE and R&D activities on productivity. These issues have been well researched in developed and many developing countries in capital‐intensive industries, but no dedicated study is available that has addressed this issue from the perspective of the highly labor intensive industries such as the garment industry. The findings of this research would enrich the present knowledge stock of manufacturing systems. Eventually, the findings would be the basis for further research on manufacturing process for enhancing performance. Based on this concept, this study would be valuable to policy makers, academics and government agencies.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether the state of infrastructure development in Sub-Saharan Africa actually stimulates industrial sector productivity, using a panel data set of 17 countries spanning from 2003 to 2018.

The study used panel least square estimation technique to examine the relationship between the variables.

The result of the study indicates that the major factor that influences industrial sector productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa is their quantity and quality of telecommunication infrastructure. Analysis shows that the relatively low level of industrial sector productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa is largely due to their poor electricity and transport infrastructure and underutilization of water supply and sanitation infrastructure.

The government should partner with other developed countries of the world such as Germany, Japan, Sweden, Netherlands, Austria, Singapore, United States of America, United Kingdom, Switzerland and United Arab Emirates, which are the top ten countries in infrastructure ranking as currently released by the World Bank, to equally extend their quality infrastructure to their own country for enhanced industrialization.

The novelty of this research lies on the fact it is a cross-country study as against the few empirical studies that focused only on a single country. Also, the study made use of the four main indicators of infrastructure development in an economy, which are electricity infrastructure, transport infrastructure, telecommunication infrastructure and water supply and sanitation infrastructure, to examine its effect on industrial sector productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This study aims to examine the effect of trade liberalization on welfare, directly or indirectly, through the productivity of the agricultural sector and the productivity of the industrial sector, which affects economic growth and the welfare of the community.

This study is explanatory as it looks at causal relationships between one variable with another (causality relationship). The data used in this study are secondary data from various sources, such as the International Financial Statistics (IFS) from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, Bank Indonesia reports, Central Bureau of Statistics and several other sources. All data used in this study is annual data for each research variable from 1986 to 2016.

Based on the results of the analysis, there is a significant direct and negative influence of the agricultural sector productivity on economic growth, a significant direct and negative influence of the industrial sector productivity on economic growth.

Considering the diverse effects of trade liberalization both on economic growth and people's welfare in developing countries, the researcher was interested in knowing how trade liberalization affects Indonesia. This study tries to observe and analyze those relations.

Prior research demonstrated that China's Outward FDI (OFDI) is aimed at sustaining long-term economic growth by promoting industrialization and technological upgrading in the country. However, empirical evidence on the effectiveness of this strategy remains scarce. This study intends to fill this gap by exploiting endogenous changes in industrial productivity stemming from OFDI to examine if China's new strategy to spur OFDI is economically beneficial for the industries involved.

The authors employed the two-step system-GMM and pooled mean group approaches on a panel dataset of 18 Chinese industries over the 2004–2017 period. The industrial sectors are further classified into the state dominated and non-state dominated ones to evaluate whether the productivity growth impact of OFDI varies by the level of ownership structure. Besides, the dataset is further decomposed into the ex ante and ex-post BRI era to test if this initiative has altered the underlying relationship.

The results provide robust evidence that China's OFDI through reverse spillover effects promotes productivity growth in the domestic industries, and such productivity gains are greater for the non-state dominated industries, and the OFDI in the BRI era. The findings suggest that OFDI can act as a catch-up strategy to release excess capacity and acquire technology and smart business practices.

This study is the first attempt to highlight the reverse productivity spillovers associated with OFDI at the industrial level. The study's findings guide the government officials and the practitioners of foreign investment to better understand the implications of their investment projects in terms of technology improvements and to optimize market opportunities.

The purpose of this paper is to present the argument that there exists a threshold limitation to new knowledge creation, associated with a global productivity growth slowdown, a global decline in research and development (R&D) productivity and a decline in the growth of globalisation.

Taking the form of a conceptual paper, this paper seeks to advance the polemic that despite discussions of a ‘fourth industrial revolution,’ there has been no substantive change in a global decline in productivity growth, particularly in developed countries. Specific threats are identified and related to the consequences of technological proliferation in the absence of an effective research response to address them. Certain theoretical propositions are derived, with the suggestion that novel theory promises a ‘fifth industrial revolution,’ one that might ultimately reverse the downward trend in global productivity growth.

Drawing on management theory, derivation of the theoretical propositions suggests the existence of a mechanism related to research productivity enhancement. Discussions suggest that this mechanism might ultimately explain how the R&D productivity decline, evident since the 1970s, may ultimately be reversed.

The paper seeks to provoke novel thinking about the consequences of a failure to develop a research agenda explicitly focused on the attainment of economies of scale in the research process itself.

This chapter does three things. First, it estimates regional gross domestic product (GDP) for three different geographical levels in Switzerland (97 micro regions, 16 labor market basins, and 3 large regions). Second, it analyzes the evolution of regional inequality relying on a heuristic model inspired by Williamson (1965), which features an initial growth impulse in one or several core regions and subsequent diffusion. Third, it uses index number theory to decompose regional inequality into three different effects: sectoral structure, productivity, and comparative advantage.

The results can be summarized as follows: As a consequence of the existence of multiple core regions, Swiss regional inequality has been comparatively low at higher geographical levels. Spatial diffusion of economic growth occurred across different parts of the country and within different labor market regions. This resulted in a bell-shaped evolution of regional inequality at the micro regional level and convergence at higher geographical levels. In early and in late stages of the development process, productivity differentials were the main drivers of inequality, whereas economic structure was determinant between 1888 and 1941. The poorest regions suffered from comparative disadvantage, that is, they were specialized in the vary sector (agriculture), where their relative productivity was comparatively lowest.

The current wave of decreasing electricity supply to meet the immediate demand of the populace is influencing not only economic growth but also the industrial productivity of the ECOWAS sub-region. In this context, this paper investigates the long-run and causal relationships between electricity consumption and industrial output in selected ECOWAS countries over the period 1971–2017.

The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bound testing approach is employed to determine the existence of relationships among the variables. The causal nexus between electricity consumption and industrial output is examined using both the Toda-Yamamoto causality test and the bootstrap-corrected causality technique.

The long run results indicated that increasing electricity supply enhances industrial output only in Benin, Cote d'Ivoire, Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. Furthermore, the causality test results confirmed the presence of all four hypotheses in this study, but the two causality tests agree, particularly in the evidence of growth and neutrality hypotheses. In the cases of Benin, Burkina Faso, Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, a unilateral causality running from electricity consumption to industrial output is found. However, no evidence of causality between electricity consumption and industrial production has been confirmed in Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea Bissau, Liberia and Niger.

The relevant energy stakeholders in the subregion need to reprioritize their policy framework to focus more on the electricity sector of their economies since electricity consumption is identified as an important driver of industrial growth in the West African countries.

This is the first study to provide a comparative and country-specific investigation of the nexus between electricity consumption and industrial output in Africa, particularly in the West African region.

This study aims to explore potential paradigm shift in how “global economies” react to adverse macroeconomic conditions from key dominant economies such as the US and the Chinese economies. This is done by examining how economic activities within key economies around the world react to, or are impacted by, modeled adverse macroeconomic condition emanating from the Chinese and the US economies.

To verify potential paradigm shift in how external macroeconomic uncertainty impacts “global” industrial productivity and overall gross domestic product (GDP) growth within selected economies, this study opts for seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) model. Adoption of this method has been influenced by the potential for correlated error terms between modeled adverse macroeconomic condition, industrial productivity and GDP growth variables being tested in a two-equation system.

Empirical results based on SUR analysis find no evidence of this potential paradigm shift within the time frame examined in the study. Estimated results suggest that notwithstanding the recent growth surge of the Chinese economy, macroeconomic happenings within the US economy still exert significantly more influence on key economies around the world. For instance, this study finds that macroeconomic uncertainty associated with the US economy significantly constrains both industrial productivity and overall GDP growth within most of the economies tested, whereas the same condition emanating from the Chinese economy seems to rather have a weak positive impact on the same macroeconomic variables.

Research results are strictly limited to the focus time frame for this study; it is likely that expanded data involving more years beyond what was analyzed in this study could yield different results.

This study is an original research based on data from a reputable US federal institution.