Growing like Spain: 1995-2007

En un trabajo titulado “ Growing like Spain: 1995-2007ii”, los autores señalan que el crecimiento económico en este espacio de tiempo se debió más a la acumulación de factores que a un aumento de la productividad. Mientras en España se crecía a un 3,5%, la productividad de los factores descendía a una tasa de 0,7%. La explicación que, desde la clase política, se nos acostumbra a dar es la de que los factores se desplazaron a sectores poco productivos, como el de la construcción. Pero esta explicación no se soporta con la evidencia encontrada. Lo importante de este trabajo es que la explicación entre esa disminución de la productividad durante tanto tiempo (particular el caso español) puede deberse al comportamiento que tuvieron las empresas de sectores que necesitan del gobierno para sobrevivir (obras públicas, energía, etc.). Si los gobiernos hubiesen destinado una mayor parte de los recursos a empresas “no clientelares” la productividad hubiese crecido a una tasa de 0,3%. Muy interesante, pues según este resultado, no fueron causas de restricciones financieras, problemas del mercado de trabajo, pero tampoco de competitividad, los que había detrás de la pérdida de productividad en nuestra economía

http://articulosclaves.blogspot.com.es/2016/12/growing-like-spain-1995-2007.html

Growing like Spain: 1995-2007∗
Manuel Garc´ıa-Santana UPF, Barcelona GSE, and CEPR Enrique Moral-Benito Banco de Espa˜na Josep Pijoan-Mas CEMFI and CEPR Roberto Ramos Banco de Espa˜na February 28, 2016

Abstract

Spanish GDP grew at an average rate of 3.5% per year during the expansion of 1995-2007, well above the EU average of 2.2%. However, this growth was based on factor accumulation rather than productivity gains as TFP fell at an annual rate of 0.7%. Using firm-level administrative data for all sectors we show that deterioration in the allocative efficiency of productive factors across firms was at the root of the low TFP growth in Spain, while misallocation across sectors played only a minor role. Cross-industry variation reveals that the increase in misallocation was more severe in sectors where government influence is more important for business success, which represents novel evidence on the potential macroeconomic costs of crony capitalism. In contrast, sectoral differences in financial dependence, skill intensity, innovative content, tradability, or capital structures intensity appear to be unrelated to changes in allocative efficiency. All in all, the observed high output growth together with increasing firm-level misallocation in all sectors is consistent with an expansion driven by a demand boom rather than by structural reforms

Introduccion...

The 1994-2007 expansion was the longest in Spanish history. GDP grew at an average of 3.5% per year, which compares favourably to the EU average of 2.2% over the same period. However, Spanish growth during this expansion was based on factor accumulation rather than productivity gains. In particular, annual TFP growth was -0.7%, which is low in comparison to other developed economies such as the US (+0.6%) or EU (+0.4%). Such a dismal performance of productivity growth is surprising for a country that is so well integrated in a trade and monetary union with some of the World technology leaders. We argue that the source of negative TFP growth was the increase in the within-industry misallocation of production factors across firms. We use a large administrative data set of Spanish firms in all sectors to compute several measures of allocative efficiency. In particular, for every year between 1995 and 2007, we compute the potential TFP gains due to factor reallocation as in Hsieh and Klenow (2009) and “model-free” measures of allocative efficiency such as the dynamic decomposition of TFP growth in Foster, Haltiwanger, and Krizan (2006) and the Olley and Pakes (1996) covariances. All types of measures show a severe deterioration of allocative efficiency over the period, which is pervasive across all sectors but larger in construction and services. Instead, we show that the aggregate data from EU-KLEMS is inconsistent with an increase in misallocation across sectors, which casts doubt on the widespread view that specialization in low productivity sectors such as construction was the main force behind Spanish low TFP growth. We thus argue that allocative efficiency of resources across firms is at the root of the low rates of TFP growth observed in Spain. Our results are very stark: had the level of within-sector allocative efficiency remained constant to the level observed in 1995, TFP growth would have been around 0.8% per year. Therefore, our conclusion is that aggregate productivity in Spain stagnated because the economy increasingly allocated capital and labor in the wrong place across firms within each industry....

sigue en:

https://www.cemfi.es/~pijoan/Welcome_files/missallocation_Spain_v34.pdf