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Mexico has embarked on a bold package of structural reforms that will help it to break away from three decades of slow growth and low productivity. Major structural measures have been legislated to improve competition, education, energy, the financial sector, labour, infrastructure and the tax system, among many, and implementation has started in earnest. If fully implemented, these reforms could increase annual trend per capita GDP growth by as much as one percentage point over the next ten years, with the energy reforms having the most front-loaded effects. Beyond this, a second wave could go further to tackle other structural bottlenecks. These challenges include reducing stringent regulation – particularly at the local level – and addressing corruption and weak enforcement of legal rights. The justice system is often slow and inefficient. And in the agricultural sector, strict land use restrictions and the structure of subsidies promote inefficiency. Moving even closer towards OECD best practices could increase potential growth by another percentage point annually.

Economics --- Mexico

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Over the last decade, Mexico’s unit labour costs decreased relative to other emerging markets’, especially compared to China’s. This decrease boosted Mexico’s trade competitiveness, particularly in the manufacturing sector. However, Mexico’s increasing competitiveness masks one of the country’s fundamental concerns, which is the absence of productivity improvements. The aim of this paper is two-fold: first, we examine the evolution of total factor productivity in Mexico’s manufacturing sector, as compared to China’s. Firm-level data is employed to analyse the distribution and characteristics of productivity across Mexico’s regions. Second, using regional data for the period 2005–2012, we study the policy impediments behind sluggish productivity improvements, particularly to determine how labour informality may have contributed. The study takes advantage of Mexico’s heterogeneity across regions in terms of productivity, market regulation, financial constraints and firm size to identify economic policies that can help to boost productivity in the future.

Economics --- China, People’s Republic

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This paper assesses the progress of China’s transition toward a market economy by examining the structure of ownership, productivity, and profitability, as well as the concentration of production across firms, industries and regions. It does this by analyzing a database of firm microdata of the quarter of a million industrial companies in operation during the 1998–2003 period. Results show that the private sector now accounts for more than half of industrial output, compared with barely more than a quarter in 1998, and operates much more efficiently than the public sector. Higher productivity has fed through to profitability, motivating greater regional specialization of production. These changes are consistent with what would be expected in a market-based economy, and suggests that reforms are making rapid progress. This Working Paper relates to the 2005 OECD Economic Survey of China (www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/china).

Economics --- China, People’s Republic

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This paper examines how import penetration affects firms' productivity growth taking into account the heterogeneity in firms' distance to the efficiency frontier and country differences in product market regulation. Using firm-level data for a large number of OECD countries, the analysis reveals non-linear effects of both sectoral import penetration and de jure product market regulation measures depending on firms' positions along the global distribution of productivity levels. The heterogeneous effects of international competition and domestic product market regulation on firm-level productivity growth are consistent with a neo-Schumpeterian view of trade and regulation. Close to the technology frontier, import competition has a strongly positive effect on firm-level productivity growth, with stringent domestic regulation reducing this effect substantially. However, far from the frontier, neither import competition nor its interaction with domestic regulation has a statistically significant effect on firm-level productivity growth. The results suggest that insufficient attention has been made in the trade literature to within-firm productivity growth.

Economics

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Using plant-level data from the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) for the fiscal years from 1998-99 through 2007-08, this study provides plant-level cross-state/time-series evidence of the impact of employment protection legislation (EPL) on total factor productivity (TFP) and labour productivity in India. Identification of the effect of EPL follows from a difference-in-differences estimator inspired by Rajan and Zingales (1998) that takes advantage of the state-level variation in labour regulation and heterogeneous industry characteristics. The fundamental identification assumption is that EPL is more likely to restrict firms operating in industries with higher labour intensity and/or higher sales volatility. Our results show that firms in labour intensive or more volatile industries benefited the most from labour reforms in their states. Our point estimates indicate that, on average, firms in labour intensive industries and in flexible labour markets have TFP residuals 14% higher than those registered for their counterparts in states with more stringent labour laws. However, no important differences are identified among plants in industries with low labour intensity when comparing states with high and low levels of EPL reform. Similarly, the TFP of plants in volatile industries and in states that experienced more pro-employer reforms is 11% higher than that of firms in volatile industries and in more restrictive states; however, the TFP residuals of plants in industries with low labour intensity are 11% lower in high EPL reform states than in states with lower levels of EPL reform. In sum, the evidence presented here suggests that the high labour costs and rigidities imposed through Indian federal labour laws are lessened by labour market reforms at the state level.

Employment --- Economics --- India