تجزیه و تحلیل تعادل عمومی در تکامل بهره وری خدمات کانادا

Can the slowdown in total factor productivity (TFP) that we have experienced since the mid-seventies be ascribed to the increasing importance of services, or do we instead observe an improvement of productivity in the service sectors by way of learning-by-doing or specialization? We feel that such questions are best answered within a general equilibrium analysis of the whole economy, i.e. a structural view of the whole economy. We maximize the level of domestic consumption subject to commodity balances and endowment constraints. The Lagrange multipliers associated with the endowment constraints measure the marginal productivities of labor and capital. We declare these shadow prices to be the factor productivities. The main empirical contribution of this paper is a reexamination of the services paradox. In Canada, the sluggish productivity in services is limited to finance, insurance and real estate, and to business and personal services. Any attempt to resolve the services paradox may focus on these two sectors. Transportation, trade, and to a lesser extent communication are progressive sectors.

Services have long ago relegated manufacturing to second rank in the importance of an economy's total activity. It is often argued that services suffer from the Baumol disease. More and more resources are devoted to services, where productivity gains are limited. The whole economy thus drifts to a lower productivity performance, unless the growth of services is offset by input savings in manufacturing. Oulten (1997) shows how resource shifts to service sectors with sluggish productivity may increase aggregate productivity if it concerns intermediate (business) rather than final (personal) services. Can the slowdown in total factor productivity (TFP) that we have experienced since the mid-seventies be ascribed to the increasing importance of services, or has this drag been offset by big savings of other inputs in manufacturing? Have services suffered from the Baumol disease at all, or do we instead observe an improvement of productivity in the services sectors by way of learning-by-doing or specialization? We feel that such questions are best answered within a general equilibrium analysis of the whole economy, i.e. a structural view of the whole economy. Our approach does not belong to the class of general equilibrium models, which model supply and demand functions and aim at finding prices, which sustain observed data as equilibrium outcomes. Our position is to start from the fundamentals of the economy to establish the production frontier and its shift over time, and to compute competitive prices, which sustain that frontier. We do not capture the variations of the economy about its frontier in this paper. The full theory of fundamentals based productivity measurement is presented in ten Raa and Mohnen (2000). Also, in this paper we focus on the service sectors and assume that capital is sector specific and not differentiated by type. The fundamentals are the usual ones — endowments, technology, and preferences. Endowments are represented by a labor force and stocks of capital. Technology is given by the combined inputs and outputs of the sectors of the economy. Preferences are reflected by the pattern of domestic final demand. All the information can be extracted from input and output tables in real terms, that is constant prices. The productivities are determined as follows. We maximize the level of domestic consumption subject to commodity balances and endowment constraints. Now, as is known from the theory of mathematical programming, the Lagrange multipliers associated with the endowment constraints measure the marginal productivities of labor and capital — the consumption increments per units of additional labor or capital. In economics, these Lagrange multipliers are shadow prices that would reign under idealized conditions of perfect competition. We declare these shadow prices to be the factor productivities. The paper is organized as follows. Factor productivities and TFP are defined by means of a linear program in the next section. In Section 3 we present the data of the Canadian economy from 1962 to 1991. In Section 4 we present our results. The last section concludes.

1974–1981 interval and recovered, but not to the levels of the golden sixties, after 1982. This finding confirms conventional wisdom. Our productivity figures show greater fluctuations than what is usually reported, because they are extracted endogenously from a linear program with corner solutions. Of course, our methodology differs from conventional productivity analysis in one major respect. We compute in some sense social productivities, i.e. marginal valuations of inputs in terms of attainable total domestic consumption and not in terms of attainable individual sectoral production. We take the whole economy into account globally, with its interdependencies and mutual constraints, to derive the efficient production frontier and define productivity growth as the outward shift of that efficiency frontier rather than changes in observed input–output ratios. Our model offers some explanation to productivity growth. Some inputs can earn high returns if they are in short supply. TFP-growth is nothing but a reflection of the evolution of marginal valuations of primary factor inputs. The modeling of existing constraints is very crucial in our approach. Another key role in our analysis is played by the levels of capacity utilization. Their construction is still controversial. No estimates are available for services. Proper measures of output and capacity utilization for services are problematic, but we urge Statistics Canada to devote resources to construct such measures. Our analysis would also be enriched if we could have data on sectoral use and total availability of labor disaggregated by level of qualification and of sectoral utilization and availability of capital disaggregated by type of capital. It would allow us to get a more precise picture of scarcities in the Canadian economy. By construction, the vintage structure of capital does not matter. To relax this assumption, we would need to make investment endogenous and switch to a dynamic model, which would lead to Hulten's (1979) notion of a dynamic residual.