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Technical Change and Total Factor Productivity Growth in the Tunisian Manufacturing Industry: A Malmquist Index Approach
Author(s) -
Kalai Maha,
Helali Kamel
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
african development review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.654
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1467-8268
pISSN - 1017-6772
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8268.12210
Subject(s) - malmquist index , total factor productivity , technological change , technical change , productivity , index (typography) , technical progress , economics , manufacturing sector , sample (material) , econometrics , agricultural economics , computer science , economic growth , macroeconomics , chemistry , chromatography , world wide web
The main objective of this study is to measure technical change and total factor productivity in the Tunisian manufacturing sector using the Malmquist index approach. Applying non‐parametric frontiers techniques, we found that total factor productivity is decomposed on the basis of the technical efficiency variation and technological change for six manufacturing sectors. The results indicate that most sectors had very poor performance in terms of technological progress rate. In addition, any efficiency gain was proved to be, in large part, due to the improvement of technical rather than scale efficiency. Moreover, the total factor productivity improvement achieved, at an average rate of 1.93 per cent per year for the whole of the sample, is mainly due to the agricultural, food and chemical industries.