آیا اصلاحات اقتصادی برای بهره وری تولید مهم است؟ مدارک و شواهد از تجربه هند

Using data on 3-digit industry for 1981–2004, the study examines the association between total factor productivity and economic reforms. We first obtain the industry-level productivity numbers using advanced econometric techniques and thereafter ascertain the time frame over which economic reforms impact productivity. The evidence suggests that productivity growth is not reliably higher after reforms than prior to reforms. At the sectoral level, the interest rate channel and also the financial accelerator and labor market variables play an important role in explaining productivity improvements. At the macroeconomic level, trade policy, foreign direct investment and credit availability are found to be important in accounting for productivity growth.

A major focus of any structural reforms program is to put the country on a higher growth trajectory on a sustainable basis. A key component of achieving sustainable growth is to register consistent improvements in productivity. In fact, a significant body of literature has confirmed that the gap in income per capita between rich and poor countries is associated with large cross-country differences in total factor productivity (Hall and Jones, 1999, Howitt, 2000, Klenow and Rodriguez-Clare, 1997 and Klenow and Rodriguez-Clare, 2005). Whether and to what extent such productivity differences can be traced to differences in manufacturing productivity remains an area of on-going debate. Evidence on this score is far from unambiguous; some studies report manufacturing productivity as an important factor for differential economic growth across nations (Dollar and Wolff, 1993, Van Bart, 1993 and Van Bart and Pilat, 1993), others find it to be much less relevant (Caves et al., 1982, Harrigan, 1999 and Von Wachter, 2001).

The reforms exercise in India, undertaken as part of the overall restructuring since the early 1990s, was aimed at improving the growth prospects of the economy. Central to the process was improving the levels of productivity in the manufacturing sector. Most studies on industrial productivity fail to account for the sample selection and simultaneity bias and therefore, arrive at misleading conclusions of productivity changes. In this context, the present study employs advanced econometric techniques to compute productivity of the Indian manufacturing sector since 1980 that encompasses the economic reforms program. Industry-level productivity measures were obtained as the difference between actual and expected output, where the latter is the fitted value from the estimation of a production function. The estimated production function follows from the strategy suggested by Levinsohn and Petrin (2003) to account for endogeneity problems.