To decompose total factor productivity growth into technical progress, technical efficiency change, allocative efficiency change, and scale efficiency change, a stochastic frontier approach was ...applied to Malaysian manufacturing data covering the period 2000 to 2004. The results show that total factor productivity was driven mainly by technical progress but was hurt by deteriorating technical efficiency. Scale efficiency and allocative efficiency also exerted significant influences on total factor productivity. The skill and quality of workers were the most important determinants of technical efficiency, whereas foreign ownership, imports, and employee quality underpinned technical progress. The impact of firm size on scale economies differed across industries.
Key points
In the 2000s unions in the UK and US made innovative use of the Internet to deliver union services and move toward open source unions better suited for the modern world than traditional ...unions structures.
In contrast to analysts who see unions as being on an inexorable path of decline, it is argued that these innovations are changing unions from institutions of the Webbs to institutions of the Web, which will improve their effectiveness and revive their role as the key worker organization in capitalism.
Can the Internet produce more effective and successful unions and help resuscitate the labour movement in the UK and US?
Passage of the original Social Security Act in 1935, Public Law (P.L.) 74-271, represented one of the watershed achievements of social welfare reform in American history. For the first time, workers ...were guaranteed a basic floor of protection against the hardships of poverty. In the ensuing decades, more than 100 million beneficiaries have realized the value of this protection through the receipt of monthly Social Security payments. As this guarantee has endured and progressed, the policies and administration of such a vast and complex program have required ongoing modifications-more than 150 such revisions over the past 73 years. To some extent, these amendments can be seen as an ongoing refinement process, with the Social Security Protection Act of 2004 (SSPA) being another incremental step in the development of a social insurance program that best meets the evolving needs of American society. This article discusses the legislative history of the SSPA in detail. It includes summaries of the provisions and a chronology of the modification of these proposals as they passed through the House and Senate, and ultimately to the president's desk.
This paper studies Cambodia's bilateral trade flows through investigating the impact of trade structure in a framework of the gravity equation over the period 2000-2004 after its entry into the ASEAN ...Free Trade Area (AFTA). The measure of trade structure is constructed by the degree of trade complementarity between Cambodia and its trading partners. The empirical results show that a higher degree of trade complementarity is associated with a higher level of trade flows. This could be consistent with a Heckscher-Ohlin model in that factor endowment difference between the countries, which is captured by the measure of trade structure, is a dominant driving force for trade flows. Some related implications are also discussed.
