Suchergebnisse

In an effort to inform strategic options to improve agricultural productivity, we examine the impact of social service expenditures on the marginal productivity of agricultural inputs. Increasing agricultural productivity is often advocated as a way to reduce poverty, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where many people still rely on agriculture as their main source of income. Unfortunately, limited national budgets are often focused on meeting short-term needs rather than on making longer-term, growth-enhancing investments in agriculture and rural areas. Using Tanzania as a case study, this research investigates the direct and indirect impacts of district-level health and education expenditures on marginal productivities of agricultural inputs through education and health outcomes. This approach uses recently-released data for Tanzania and health and education spending data as well as an innovative combination of approaches including a general covariance structure model and a mixed linear model to allow for district-level heterogeneity. Our results suggest a significant and nonlinear relationship between social outcomes and social expenditures and point to the importance of these outcomes in productivity. Marginal productivities of inputs are significant and confirm the validity of a heterogeneous technology approach. As expected, labor productivity, in particular, responds significantly to health and education outcomes. The findings also point to the importance of controlling for intra-country socioeconomic and agro-climatic heterogeneity. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; GRP37 ; WCAO

IFPRI3; ISI; CRP2; D.2 Public Investment priorities and Impacts ; MTID; WCAO; PIM ; PR ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

A most prominent economic framework, certainly very influential in policy circles, is the idea of a labour market, in which wages are set according to the demand for labour, which depends upon the marginal productivity of labour, and the supply of labour, which depends upon how subjective preferences lead to a given trade-off between consumption and leisure. This analytical framework, which leads to the conclusion that an efficient allocation of labour requires sufficient flexibility in the labour market, contrasts sharply with the approach to human labour of the early classical political economists, who studied value not in terms of supply and demand curves, but rather in terms of the cost of production, expressed in terms of human labour. Here I will discuss these two alternative approaches to human labour, taking into account the methodological and theoretical consistency of each approach, its empirical validity, and the implications that each framework has for economic policy making and the construction of political discourse. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

The Walrasian theory of labor market equilibrium predicts that in the absence of any market frictions, workers earn a wage rate equal to their marginal productivity. However, this observation is not supported empirically for various economies. Based on the neoclassical tradition, the ratio of the marginal product of labor to real wages is generally defined as the Pigouvian exploitation rate. In this paper, the authors calculate this specific wage-productivity gap for the manufacturing sector in OECD economies and investigate its relation to the unemployment rate along with other variables such as government taxation, capital expansion, unionization, inflation. The authors find that the wage productivity gap gives a robust and significantly positive response to shocks to the unemployment rate and negative response to shocks to unionization.

Why does capital not flow to developing countries as predicted by the neoclassical model? What are the direction and degree of capital misallocation across nations? We revisit these questions by removing public capital from total capital to achieve a more accurate estimate of the marginal productivity of private capital. We calculate marginal product of capital schedules in a large sample of advanced and developing countries. Our main result is that, in terms of the Lucas Paradox, private capital is allocated remarkably efficiently across nations. Tentative estimates of the marginal productivity of public capital suggest that the deadweight loss from public capital misallocation across countries can be much larger than that from private capital. ; Lowe gratefully acknowledges financial support from ESRC, award number ES/I02476X/1, and Perez-Sebastian from Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (ECO2015-70540-P MINECO/FEDER) and the Generalitat Valenciana (PROMETEO/2013/037). Papageorgiou acknowledges financial support from the UK Department for International Development.