manufacturing

The paper examines the dependence of firm restructuring on private outside ownership concentration in Czech manufacturing sector after privatization. It starts with the argumentation that the most important actors in the post-privatization ownership structure in the Czech Republic were investment privatization funds, followed by the state, and that the ‘rules of the game’ opened a large space for moral hazard.

Using measures of technology shocks derived from production function estimates for four-digit U.S. manufacturing industries, the author finds that sectoral inflation rates are more responsive to negative, as opposed to positive technology disturbances in periods of higher economy-wide inflation, commodity price increases and expansionary monetary policy shocks.

The share of employment in manufacturing as well as the relative price of manufactures has declined sharply over the postwar period, while the share of manufacturing output relative to GDP has remained roughly constant, according to the authors.

The Georgia Manufacturing Survey (GMS) is a statewide study conducted every 2-3 years by Georgia Tech’s office of Economic Development and Technology Ventures and the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy to assess the business and technological conditions of Georgia’s manufacturers. The theme of GMS 2005 is Innovation in Manufacturing. This summary presents the key findings.

The report from Battelle Memorial Institute includes findings from an economic analysis of the state’s advanced
manufacturing sector, a competitive assessment of Iowa’s infrastructure to support the advanced manufacturing sector as compared to a set of
benchmark states, and proposed strategies and actions to enhance the competitiveness of Iowa’s advanced manufacturing sector.

The authors report several characteristics of industrial dynamics, including the firm size distribution, Gibrats Law, and also the distribution of growth rates and their autocorrelation. They se a variety of econometric techniques, looking first at the aggregate and subsequently at a sectoral level. Many of the results corroborate previous findings, but there are also several surprises.

Production capital and technology, fundamental to understanding output and productivity growth, are unobserved except at disaggregated levels and must be estimated prior to being used in empirical analysis. The authors apply the method to annual data from 1947-97 for U.S. total manufacturing and compare the estimates with those reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The present study uses data on industrial output and employment to examine the sources of these trends. It finds that the productivity rebound since 1995 has been widespread, with approximately two-fifths of the productivity rebound occurring in New Economy industries.

The study provides insight into the current state of Wisconsin manufacturing which is still a tremendous engine for growth. The report identifies driver industries within manufacturing that strongly impact our economy and specific recommendations to help these driver industries continue their growth into the future.

The authors measure the capacity output of a firm as the maximum amount producible by a firm given a specific quantity of the quasi-fixed input and an overall expenditure constraint for its choice of variable inputs. We compute this indirect capacity utilization measure for the total manufacturing sector in the US as well as for a number of disaggregated industries, for the period 1970-2001.