Foreign manufacturing, regional agglomeration and technical efficiency in UK industries: a stochastic production frontier approach

The paper examines howfar foreign manufacturing investment in UK industries, together with the spatial agglomeration of those industries, affect technical efficiency. The paper links research on the estimation of technical efficiency,with those literatures demonstrating the economies associated with foreign direct investment and spatial agglomeration. The methodology involves estimation of a stochastic production frontier with random components associated with industry technical inefficiency, and a standard error. The paper also explores whether the degree of foreign involvement has a greater impact on technical efficiency where the domestic industry sector is characterized by comparatively high productivity and spatial agglomeration. The policy implications of the analysis are discussed.

ICT and technical efficiency of the manufacturing industries in Iran

This paper extends the existing evidence on the relationship between Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and productivity using data from the entire Iranian manufacturing sector (22 industries) over the period 1993?1999. Estimates of efficiency using panel data confirm the positive and significant impact of ICT investments on productivity. Our finding is consistent with the most recent literatures in the context of developed and a few middle-income developing countries. Human capital and increasing ICT capital are probably two determining factors in gaining the positive payoffs from ICT investments in Iran.

The frontier approach to the measurement of productivity and technical efficiency

In 1957, Farrell proposed to measure technical (in)efficiency as the realised deviation from a frontier isoquant. Since then, the research has developed several methods to derive the production frontier and it has also extended its scope in applying frontier techniques to the measurement of total factor productivity. In this paper, I present the core techniques for the measurement of technical efficiency and productivity based on the notion of frontier and introduce the more recent technological advances in the field.

Patterns of corporate governance and technical efficiency in Italian manufacturing

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationship between the corporate governance system and technical efficiency in Italian manufacturing. We use a non-parametric frontier technique (DEA) to derive technical efficiency measures for a sample of Italian firms taken from nine manufacturing industries. These measures are then related to the characteristics of the corporate governance system. Two of these characteristics turn out to have a positive impact on technical efficiency: the percentage of the company shares owned by the largest shareholder and the fact that a firm belongs to a pyramidal group. Interestingly, a trade-off emerges between these influences, in the sense that one is stronger in industries where the other is weaker. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Organizational capital, product market competition and technical efficiency in Italian cooperatives

This paper tries to identify under which conditions increasing market competition may help cooperatives to improve technical efficiency to guarantee positive profits. This hypothesis is first formalized in a partial equilibrium framework and then is tested on a sample of Italian conventional and cooperative firms, using frontier analysis. Technical efficiency indexes are computed by using the one-stage approach as suggested by Battese and Coelli (1995), where proxies for competition are introduced as determinants of efficiency, along with other exogenous factors accounting for the firms’ heterogeneity. However, the overall impact of increasing competition on efficiency is negative.

Why critical pedagogy and popular education matter today

Few today doubt that English Higher Education (HE), like the wider world in which it is located, is in crisis. This is, in part, an economic crisis, as the government response to the current recession seems to be that of introducing the kind of neoliberal ‘shock doctrine’ (Klein 2007) or ‘shock therapy’ (Harvey 2005) that previously resulted in swingeing cuts in public services in Southern nations. Our aim in producing this volume is that these contributions help develop a collective response to the seeming limits of these conditions. We view the strength of these contributions in part as providing palpable evidence of how we and our colleagues are acting with critical hope under current conditions so that we might encourage others to work with us to build, together, more progressive formal and informal education systems that address and seek to redress multiple injustices of the world today.