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TFP Growth and Structural Change in Transition Economies a discussion of the paper by El-hadj Bah and Josef Brada. Athanasios Vamvakidis 14 th Dubrovnik Economic Conference. A challenging task. Estimating TFP growth for transition economies is a challenge: Short time series
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TFP Growth and Structural Change in Transition Economiesa discussion of the paper by El-hadj Bah and Josef Brada Athanasios Vamvakidis 14th Dubrovnik Economic Conference
A challenging task • Estimating TFP growth for transition economies is a challenge: • Short time series • Measurement errors • Structural breaks • No data for capital stock • Structural transformation
Paper’s contribution • TFP estimates “without resource to capital stock data,” using sectoral employment and GDP per capita data • Sectoral estimates to explicitly address structural transformation
What have we learned? • Transition economies have lower TFP than Austria • They are caching up, but not always and not very fast • Structural transformation (inter-sectoral movement of labor) does not play a large role
Potential problems • Can one use the US parameters for transition economies? • Not clear how the initial and subsequent capital stocks were estimated: I would not be able to replicate it based on what is in the paper • Other studies find a large growth contribution of TFP growth in transition economies • Why use Austria for comparisons and not the euro area average?
Related work IMF, “Regional Economic Outlook, Europe,” April 2008, Chapter 3