Productivity Trends in India's Manufacturing Sectors in the Last Two Decades

By Bulent Unel. Social Science Research Network, 2003

173 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Starting in the late 1970s, the Indian authorities implemented a series of reforms aimed at exposing the economy to greater competition and at liberalizing key aspects of economic activity. This paper investigates productivity trends in India's (registered) manufacturing sectors during the 1980s and 1990s. The main findings of the paper are (i) labor and total factor productivity (TFP) growth in total manufacturing and many of the component sectors since 1980 were markedly higher than that in the preceding two decades, although the extent of the acceleration in TFP growth depends critically on the underlying assumptions about factor elasticities and the assumed structure of the production function; (ii) productivity growth for total manufacturing as well as for many subsectors picked up further after the 1991 reforms; and (iii) classification of the best performing sectors and the weakest performing sectors, based on comparative TFP, remains robust to changes in underlying assumptions.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cdf48bb36118604ce4f9cd1f2458b51632861f14

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Citations in the corpus

From “Hindu Growth” to Productivity Surge: The Mystery of the Indian Growth Transition (2004, unknown): “A number of studies have argued that manufacturing experienced a surge in productivity in the 1980s (Ahluwalia, 1995, Unel, 2003 ) although some of these estimates have been contested (Hulten and Srinivasan, 1999; and Balakrishnan and Pushpagandan, 1994).9 For”
India's Mysterious Manufacturing Miracle (2011, background): “6 Rodrik and Subramanian (2004) use the Unel (2003) estimates for manufacturing from 1980–1997.”
India's Pattern of Development: What Happened, What Follows? (2006, unknown): “(Ahluwalia, 1991 and 1995, Unel, 2003).”
The Pattern and Causes of Economic Growth in India (2007, result): “They, among others, thereby provide counter-evidence to the studies of Ahluwalia (1995) and Unel (2003) who concluded that manufacturing experienced a surge of productivity in the 1980s.”