| This study is the first attempt to compare China's economic performance with that of a European country following the approach of International Comparison of Output and Productivity (ICOP) developed by the Groningen University. The estimation of China's manufacturing output and value-added obtained with this method shows that China's labor productivity in 1995 was about 7 percent of the German level when small rural entreprises are excluded from the Chinese data, and was 5 percent of the German level when they are included. This is slightly higher than the result of the 1995 comparison between China and the US (Bai, Ren, and Szirmai, 2002). The relative productivity performance at branch level varied considerably, from 22 percent of the German level in leather products and footwear to 3.6 per cent in paper products. |
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