More evidence on technological catching-up in the manufacturing sector

Abstract

Production frontiers for the manufacturing sector are estimated to determine a “country specific” catching-up process of Total Factor Productivity (TFP).TFP gains were aimed at assessing the manufacturing industry’s productive performances for 14 OECD countries over the period between 1970-2001. Our TFP measure does not assume technical or allocative efficiency which are inherent drawbacks of usual TFP indices. We show that catching-up processes can be very different between sub-periods and across countries. A significant catching-up process was in progress in the manufacturing sector between 1970 and 1986 then it overturned over the period 1987-2001. During the first sub-period, the speed of technological catching-up of the euro-zone countries was definitely higher than those of the other European or OECD nations whereas the divergence noted in second subperiod had the same order of magnitude amongst the three groups..