An international comparison of total factor productivity changes, 1960-1993

The objective of this paper is to measure the growth of industry- wise output, inputs and productivity change and to analyse the causes of growth in output and total factor productivity of the Asian NIEs by employing Taiwan's data on thirty-four sectors during 1961-93. An international comparison of TFP among Korea, Mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore is also conducted. Finally, conclusions are drawn from the findings. For this, a translog production function, which is more general than the conventional Cobb-Douglas and constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production function is employed. In addition to the Introduction, the outline of the rest of this paper is as follows: Section 2, Methodology; Section 3, Data Compilation; Section 4, Empirical Results; Section 5, Conclusions and Suggestions.