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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.

Characteristic successes of Germany’s social market economy include both stability and productivity growth, yet mass unemployment indicates the need for reform. The conventional reform agenda emphasises Germany’s restrictive labour market. However, many targets for reform are elements of an institutional system in the labour market that promotes Germany’s culture of consensus. A model is outlined that synthesises insights from X‐efficiency and business strategy theory to highlight the positive effects of consensus on business performance. The model together with accompanying empirical data suggests that Germany’s consensus culture not only gives rise to negative outcomes associated with labour market inflexibility – in particular, sluggish employment growth – but also helps firms to generate innovation, productivity growth and sustainable competitive advantage. This implies the need for a renewed “social contract”, in which consensus not only generates productivity growth but also sustains a corporatist bias towards employment. Finally, a corporatist reform process consistent with Germany’s cultural and institutional environment is likely to be more effective than top‐down liberalisation in accelerating job creation while maintaining cultural sources of global competitiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to incorporate the spillover effects of trade on East Asian productivity, namely China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.

This study attempts to fill in the gaps of previous studies by developing applications of extensive growth theory that shows the trade spillover effects on productivity growth of ASEAN 5 plus3. It further provides a meaningful statistical analysis in which, the first step of the estimation to get the coefficients of the explanatory variables that has been used by econometric approach. It can be restated here that in addition, a second step that plugs the parameters of the variables into the model in order to compute the contribution rates of productivity indicators including the calculation of the residual of the model (total factor productivity – TFP) and GDP contributions being used by growth accounting approach. The TFP is considered be trade spillover effects indicator that is showed the technology transfer to domestic firms and human capital skills upgrading.

The paper finds that there was a little contribution of exports and imports to TFP growth in these countries during all the periods of study. It confirms that high physical capital input growth resulted in high gross domestic product (GDP) contribution and low TFP contribution with insignificant technological progress experiences by most of these countries, with the exception of Japan and to some extent, South Korea.

In this respect, the trade spillover effects had transferred technology and developed human capital skills to a greater extent in the cases of Japan and Republic of Korea and their economies considered to be productivity driven economies.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the effectiveness of the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) strategy and its role of industrial productivity in China.

To identify the causal effect of this strategy on industrial sustainable development, the authors first use the slacks-based measure model to calculate industries’ total-factor productivity (TFP) considered with CO₂ emissions as undesirable output on the provincial level. Then, the authors use the PSM-DID method to identify the difference of TFPs between provinces and industries before and after the implementation of SREB strategy.

However, the authors find that there is no difference or even a relative decrease in TFPs of industries in target provinces after the implementation of the strategy, which reveals that the SREB strategy does not play a positive role of the industries’ sustainable development in years of 2014 and 2015.

The value of this result is to identify the short-term impact of SREB strategy and to seek for probable causes and appropriate solutions.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the driving forces of China's recent rapid economic growth and its sustainability in the future.

A stochastic production frontier approach is employed in order to investigate regional productivity performances of Chinese provinces over the period 1994‐2006.

Despite the general concern of widening regional inequalities in China, the findings show a striking trend of convergence among Chinese provinces over the last decade. The empirical results also reveal a significant contribution of foreign direct investment and foreign trade to economic growth. From a macroeconomic point of view, the strong trend of economic convergence among regions could give evidence on the sustainability of rapid economic growth in China in the near future. In addition, the empirical findings show that Chinese provinces tend to compensate negative scale effects by rising productive efficiency through technological progress.

Further investigation of the non‐neutrality of technological component can yield a better understanding of the underlying convergence mechanism.

That is to say, policy makers should pursue their initiative to promote backward regions in western and inland regions and to encourage their economic integration through the free movement of production factors across regional borders. Further investment in physical and human capital construction in backward provinces are also needed to stimulate the catch‐up process.

The main contribution of this methodology is the ability to introduce various returns to scale production technology and to decompose regional productivity scores over time into two major components, namely scale and pure technical efficiencies.

The purpose of this study is to examine the spatial fluctuation spillover effect of green total factor productivity (GTFP) under the influence of Internet development.

Using panel data from 283 cities in China for the period 2003–2016, this paper explores the spatial fluctuation spillover effect of internet development on GTFP by applying the spatial autoregressive with autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model (SARspARCH).

The results of Moran's I test of the residual term and the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) value indicate that the GTFP has a spatial fluctuation spillover effect, and the estimated results of the SARspARCH model are more accurate than the spatial autoregressive (SAR) model and the spatial autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (spARCH) model. Specifically, the internet development had a positive spatial fluctuation spillover effect on GTFP in 2003, 2011, 2012 and 2014, and the volatility spillover effect weakens the positive spillover effect of internet development on GTFP. Moreover, Internet development has a significant positive spatial fluctuation spillover effect on GTFP averagely in eastern China and internet-based cities.

The results of this study provide digital solutions for policymakers in improving the level of GTFP in China, with more emphasis on regional synergistic governance to ensure growth.

This paper expands the research ideas for spatial econometric models and provides a more valuable reference for China to achieve green development.

The consequences of extreme climatic events that threaten food security have created the urgent need to properly adopt climate-smart adaptation techniques to improve productivity. The study examined the sustainability responses to climate-smart adaptation and the implication it has for explaining the food security situations among farm households in the Central Region of Ghana.

We estimated Heckit treatment effect model to analyse cross-sectional data collected from randomly selected farmers in the Central Region.

Analysis of farm sustainability index suggests that farmers' agricultural practices in response to climate change are lowly or moderately sustainable. We further found that while majority of the farm households are severely food insecure or food insecure with hunger, only about one-third are food insecure without hunger and the remaining few being food secure. The sustainability of farm practices is being impacted by the farmers’ choice of climate smart adaptation measures at the farm level. Consequently, the farm households' food security situation is found to be improved when sustainable farming practices are employed in the face of managing climate change effects.

Conclusions drawn from the study findings give rooms for policy implications that suggest responsibilities for policymakers, farmers and other stakeholders to promote CSA practices in food crop production in Ghana. These policy implications will contribute to improve crop productivity, increase incomes and thus enhance food security among farm families. Awareness campaign about benefits of CSA practices and technologies need to be strengthened among farmers in Ghana by government and NGOs that matter in promoting farm resilience to climate change. Given the important impacts of sustainable farm practices on household food security situation, policies that seek to build the adaptive capacity of farmers to climate vulnerability impacts should take into consideration the sustainability dimensions of the adaptation and mitigation measures to be advocated for use at farm levels.

Our paper contributes to literature knowledge on climate-smart adaptation practices effect on food security as evidenced in some recent literature. The paper makes a unique contribution by highlighting the food security implication of the sustainability impact of CSA practices, thereby exploring sustainability as an impact pathway between climate smart adaptations practices and food security in a developing country like Ghana. We approached our study aiming at making new contribution by introducing in the study implementation a quasi-experimental research design which future studies on impacts of climate smart adaptation practices can replicate.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of intellectual capital on bank productivity in an emerging market in Africa.

The Malmquist productivity index (MPI) is employed to estimate productivity growth of 18 banks in Ghana from 2003 to 2011 while the Value Added Intellectual Coefficient (VAIC) is used to measure bank intellectual capital performance. The panel-corrected standard errors estimation technique is used to estimate a panel regression model with MPI as the dependent variable. Bank market concentration and bank size are controlled for in the regression analysis.

The authors find productivity growth to be largely driven by efficiency changes compared to technological changes. The results from the regression analysis indicate that VAIC has a positive effect on the productivity of banks in Ghana. The authors also find human capital efficiency and capital employed efficiency as the components of VAIC that drive productivity growth in the banking industry. Bank size and industry concentration are also identified as significant drivers of productivity in the market.

The study’s findings support investments in intellectual capital as a means of improving the performance of banks in emerging markets.

To the best of the knowledge, this is the first study to empirically examine the relationship between intellectual capital and productivity in an emerging banking market in Africa.