|
Ardennes posted:Supply issues were more often than not due to simply a lack of capital not due to the inefficiencies of planning itself... The paper axeil posted is pretty analogous to development accounting, wherein a country's unobserved productivity* is imputed based on its observed output and capital stock. The standard formula is absurdly simple: A = y/(k^alpha), where A is productivity, y is output per capita, k is capital per capita, and the parameter alpha governs the rate at which the marginal product of capital diminishes.** The idea is simply to determine how much output a country gets from its factors of production. If you have two countries with the same level of capital per capita, the country with greater output is more productive. The point of this post is that these kinds of measurement frameworks are explicitly designed to determine whether "supply issues" are due to "lack of capital" or "inefficiencies." Why some countries have less capital than others is left totally unanswered, but the overwhelming conclusion of the incredibly large body of research on development accounting is that differences in capital across countries are really just not that important in determining differences in income per capita; productivity differences are responsible for the vast majority of income differences. My perspective on this stuff is that there's not much point trying to empirically compare command economies to market economies. GDP, total factor productivity, and related concepts really only make sense in the context of the latter, and measurement issues in the former are too severe. *I like the term "productivity" a lot better than "efficiency." The latter has a normative connotation in many contexts. **Certainly, countries do differ in their alphas. Doug Gollin has some incredibly thorough work on measuring variation in alphas across countries and analyzing the implications for development accounting. Oakland Martini fucked around with this message at 15:50 on May 3, 2021 |
#
¿
May 3, 2021 15:44
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 11:41 |
|