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Although a large literature highlights the impact of personality traits on key labor market outcomes, evidence of their impact on agricultural production decisions remains limited. Data from 1,200 Ghanaian rice farmers suggest that noncognitive skills (polychronicity, work centrality, and optimism) significantly affect simple adoption decisions, returns from adoption, and technical efficiency in rice production, and that the size of the estimated impacts exceeds that of traditional human capital measures. Greater focus on personality traits relative to cognitive skills may help accelerate innovation diffusion in the short term, and help farmers to respond flexibly to new opportunities and risks in the longer term.

Noncognitive Skills --- Personality Traits --- Rice Farmers --- Technical Efficiency --- Technology Adoption

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The topic of convergence has caught the attention of many researchers. For a long time, the economic literature on convergence asserted that less developed countries (regions) should grow faster to catch up with wealthy countries. Globalization and technology transfer appears to be among the drivers of convergence. However, for some decades, empirical researches point out that countries diverge and there is a club convergence phenomenon. The latter finding stresses that within the same group, countries converge while groups diverge. This raises the question of the conditions of convergence. This essay investigates the role of globalization in economic convergence. We assume that the degree of openness will contribute to labour productivity growth and, therefore, will promote convergence. 
We rely on the case of Africa. This choice comes from the claim that different regions may have their production frontier. We extend the Kumar & Russel (2002), Henderson & Russel (2005), and Badunenko, Henderson & Houssa (2014) approaches by integrating the globalization intensity in the analysis of convergence. This essay stands on a panel of 41 countries over 19 years (2001 to 2019). We use the DEA production frontier methodology to assess the technical efficiency and compute the Malmquist Index of Productivity (MPI) which allows decomposing labour productivity into its components. Findings reveal that globalization is a source of labour productivity growth in Africa. Hence, skipping globalization from the analysis of convergence overstates the role of physical capital accumulation and understates that of human capital accumulation. Moreover, the results show the polarization in Africa since the distribution of labour productivity is bimodal. Technological progress and human capital accumulation are the sources of divergence and polarization of African economies, and technological catch-up (efficiency change), physical capital accumulation, and globalization intensity change are the drivers of convergence in Africa. 
This study has the merit of using a “holistic” measure of globalization that encompasses all of its dimensions. Therefore, this study highlights the role of globalization in labour productivity convergence in a developing context. However, this study has some limits including the lack of a depth analysis per sector to grasp how the spillover effects from globalization disseminate across sectors. Second, the period analysis is short (19 years). Extending the analysis to a long period would provide interesting insights.

Convergence, Globalization, Labour productivity, Malmquist productivity decomposition, Technical Efficiency, Polarization, DEA --- Sciences économiques & de gestion > Economie internationale

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This paper presents a technical efficiency analysis of container ports in Latin America and the Caribbean using an input-oriented stochastic frontier model. A 10-year panel is employed with data on container throughput, port terminal area, length of berths, and number of cranes available in 67 portraits The model has three innovations with respect to the available literature: (i) it treats ship-to-shore gantry cranes and mobile cranes separately, in order to account for the higher productivity of the former; (ii) a binary variable is introduced for ports using ships' cranes, treated as an additional source of port productivity; and (iii) a binary variable is used for ports operating as transshipment hubs. The associated parameters are highly significant in the production function. The results show an improvement in the average technical efficiency of ports in the Latin America and the Caribbean region from 36 percent to 50 percent between 1999 and 2009; the best-performing port in 2009 achieved a technical efficiency of 94 percent with respect to the frontier. The paper also studies possible determinants of port technical efficiency, such as ownership, corruption, terminal purpose, income per capita, and location. The results reveal positive, but weak, associations between technical efficiency with landlord ports and with lower corruption levels; stronger results are observed between technical efficiency with specialized container terminals and with average income.

Common Carriers Industry --- Economic Theory & Research --- Latin America Ports --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Ports & Waterways --- Stochastic Frontiers --- Technical Efficiency --- Trade Cargo --- Transport and Trade Logistics

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Increasingly, entrepreneurship is being discussed and considered as a source of high economic growth and competitiveness. A conceptual process of creative construction that characterizes the dynamics between entrants and incumbents can prove quite useful to analyze the impact of countries' entrepreneurship capital on economic performance and can be a guide for economic policy. This paper applies a Stochastic Frontier Analysis approach to test the hypothesis that entrepreneurship capital promotes economic performance by serving as a conduit of knowledge spillovers. In addition, kernel density functions are employed to analyze convergence (or divergence) in the efficiency estimated for individual countries. The empirical evidence and results here tend to support the hypothesis. Specifically, the empirical analysis shows that the rate of expenditure on research and development in relation to new businesses registered has a positive and significant effect in increasing technical efficiency. These factors facilitate the dissemination of existing knowledge, develop entrepreneurship capital, and thus provide the missing link to economic performance-entrepreneurship capital. The authors also show the trends and dynamics of changes in countries' technical efficiency.

Agricultural Knowledge & Information Systems --- E-Business --- Economic Theory & Research --- Entrepreneurship Capital --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Knowledge for Development --- Labor Policies --- Private Sector Development --- Stochastic Frontier Analysis (Sfa) --- Technical Efficiency

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This article evaluates the effect of the overdraft facility (or line of credit) policy by comparing a large sample of overdraft facilitated firms and matched non-overdraft facilitated firms from Eastern Europe at the sector level. The sample firms are compared with respect to rates of different performance indicators including: technical efficiency (a Data Envelopment Analysis approach is applied to estimate the technical efficiency level for individual sectors), production workers trained, expenditures on research and development, and export activity. In order to avoid the selectivity problem, propensity score matching methodologies are adopted. The results suggest that a certain level of overdraft facility provided to firms would be needed to stimulate investment in research and development, which will eventually result in increased growth in productivity.

Access to Finance --- Bootstrapping --- Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) --- Debt Markets --- Economic Theory & Research --- Environmental Economics & Policies --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Labor Policies --- Overdraft Facility Policy --- Private Sector Development --- Propensity Score Matching --- Technical Efficiency