Productivity, Output, and Failure: A Comparison of Taiwanese and Korean Manufacturers

By B. Aw, Sukkyun Chung, Mark J. Roberts. 2003

121 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use micro panel data for producers in seven two-digit manufacturing industries in South Korea and Taiwan and identify a number of systematic differences in industry structure between the countries. Our empirical findings indicate Taiwanese industries are characterised by less concentrated market structure, more producer turnover, smaller within-industry productivity dispersion across producers, a smaller percentage of plants operating at low productivity levels, and smaller productivity differentials between surviving and failing producers. These patterns are consistent with strong competitive pressures in Taiwan that lead to market selection based on productivity differences. The patterns in Korea are consistent with the presence of some impediments to exit or entry that insulate inefficient producers from market pressures.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2a29249f2d6aa83ea81c7fbb375d78e8beb95c9d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Openness to Trade and Industry Cost Dispersion: Evidence from a Panel of Italian Firms (2008, unknown): “In Model [2] we introduce sectoral fixed effects to control for time-invariant industry characteristics that may impact on RMC dispersion.”
Corporate Profitability and the Dynamics of Competition in Emerging Markets: A Time Series Analysis (2003, unknown): “The interesting study of Korea and Taiwan by Aw et al. (2003) makes this point eloquently.”
Measuring and Analyzing Cross-country Differences in Firm Dynamics (2009, background): “4. Recent papers that explore whether firm-level dynamics appear to be crucial for the relative success of developed economies include Eslava et. a l., (2004), Roberts and Tybout (1997), Aw, Chung and Roberts (2002) and Brown and Earle (2004).”
Trade costs, firms and productivity (2006, methodology): “Plant productivity—We estimate plant’s total factor productivity using multi-factor superlative index number of Caves et al. (1982) extended by Good et al. (1997) and discussed in Aw et al. (2003) .”
Microeconomic Evidence of Creative Destruction in Industrial and Developing Countries (2004, background): “For all of these reasons, firm-level dynamics appear to be crucial for the relative success of developed economies and also for the trajectories of transition and emerging economies as they develop and open up markets (see Eslava et. al., 2004; Roberts and Tybout, 1997; Aw, Chung and Roberts, 2002;”