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N° 2000 - 18 |
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| December |
| Capital Stock and Productivity in French
Transport : An International Comparison |
Bernard Chane Kune
Nanno Mulder |
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| The efficiency of service providers is often
approximated by labour productivity. This partial measure is considered as a proxy
of overall efficiency as many services use relatively little capital. However,
in many services such as transport, capital is a major production factor. To judge
the overall efficiency of these services, labour productivity measures should
therefore be complemented by measures of capital and total factor productivity
(TFP). For France, to date capital productivity and TFP could not be estimated
for individual branches of transport as no capital input estimates were available
at this level. This paper aims to fill this gap by providing new detailed estimates
of capital input in French transport from 1970 onwards. These data are used in
combination with series on output and labour input to estimate productivity. Finally,
the French performance is compared with that of Germany, the United Kingdom and
the United States. In contrast to many other studies on productivity, the contribution
of capital to production is not measured by the value of the stock of assets but
by the volume of services rendered by this stock (as employed in Jorgenson et
al., 1987). An inconvenience of using (gross or net) capital stocks for productivity
analysis is that all other variables (such as value added and hours worked) are
flows. Capital services are the flows of a capital good into production. Capital
services are the product of the quantity of capital (supposed proportional to
the net stock) times the rental price of capital (the sum of depreciation, the
real interest rate and capital gains). Ideally the way to measure net capital
stocks is by comprehensive direct surveys. Contrary to for example the Netherlands,
no such surveys exist in France. The second best method, also used in this study,
is the perpetual inventory method (PIM) which sums several years of capital formation
and deducts assets that reached the end of their service life. Detailed series
were compiled of acquisitions and sales of capital assets in eight different parts
of transport, showing for each a breakdown into infrastructure, transport equipment,
and other machinery and equipment. In various parts of transport, producers increasingly
lease or rent transport equipment instead of buying them. In air transport for
example, in 1998 more than 80 per cent of the new aircraft were leased. For the
purpose of productivity analysis, capital stock estimates should include not only
owned assets, but also those which are rented and leased for more than one year.
However, national accounting conventions imply that the PIM frequently fails to
include non-owned assets. In the branches where leased and rented transport equipment
were the most common, e.g. air and maritime transport, registers were used instead
of the PIM as the former allows to account for non-owned assets. In the second
part of the paper productivity results are presented. Labour, capital and total
factor productivity is estimated using the Tövrnqvist discrete approximation to
the Divisia index. Between 1970 and 1997, labour productivity grew fastest in
air and maritime transport. On the contrary, trucking, urban and interurban passenger
transport, and transport services performed poorly. In the 1970s and the 1990s,
capital productivity fell in all branches except air and maritime transport. In
the 1980s, all branches showed minor capital productivity gains. Air and maritime
transport also showed the best TFP performance. In the past decades, the good
performance in air transport was accompanied by an increase in capital services
and employment. In maritime transport, on the contrary, labour and capital inputs
fell sharply. The variance of productivity patterns across transport sectors found
in France was not unique, as illustrated by a comparison with Germany, the United
Kingdom and the United States. Overall productivity gains in the Germany and the
United Kingdom were similar to those in France. The three European countries outperformed
the USA. At the sectoral level, it turns out that air transport was the branch
with the highest growth rates of capital productivity in all countries. The USA
was the only country with large productivity gains in railways. France outperformed
other countries in terms of productivity growth in air and maritime transport.
In the other branches, productivity growth in France was below that of the other
countries. |
Abstract |
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| Transport, Capital Stock, Total factor productivity,
France, International comparisons |
Keywords |
| D24, L91 |
JEL classification |
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