Firm productivity contributes to the competitiveness as well as the insertion within the\u00a0World economy. It is determined by numerous factors including the investment climate that\u00a0influences the rhythm of the investments and then, the dynamic of manufacturing firms.\u00a0Different acceptions of the productivity concept are retained in this work allowing various\u00a0calculations for a wide range of countries among which attention is more specifically brought\u00a0on four of them: Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Lebanon. Productivity or its variation reflects\u00a0the capacity of producers to transform productive resources in an output. It is measured\u00a0relatively to one or alternatively to all the productive factors, the second option defining the\u00a0Total Factor Productivity (TFP). By considering a cross sectional analysis, this study also\u00a0measures firm gap productivity with regards to most efficient enterprises within the empirical\u00a0sample, those which are positioned on the production frontier and give the \u201cbest state of art\u201d\u00a0within the sample. In the stochastic version of the model, the frontier allows to decompose the\u00a0residuals into two components: the classical random noise and the efficiency term. All the\u00a0measures of the productivity are proposed by using the World Bank\u2019s Investment Climate\u00a0Assessment datasets. These data allow measuring technical efficiencies but also identifying\u00a0which factors potentially determine them.<\/p>\n
Among the MENA countries on which this study focuses on, Moroccan firms prove to\u00a0be the best productive ones and take place with the most efficient countries just after the\u00a0performance of firms in Brazil and South Africa. If we consider the median in all the\u00a0manufacturing sectors, productivity of Moroccan firms ranks before those of Algerians and\u00a0their productivity is about 20% higher, except for food processing. Algerian firms prove\u00a0themselves more efficient than Egyptian enterprises. The conclusion we reach with TFP\u00a0measurements is quite close from the results we get while considering partial productivity of\u00a0labor. In MENA countries firms are not significantly less efficient than those in China or\u00a0India. They would be even better in some sectors, but with average salaries which are\u00a0significantly less.<\/p>\n
Moving from the TFP to technical efficiency concept suggests once again that Brazil\u00a0and South Africa are the most efficient countries although the performance of Moroccan firms\u00a0is not far from what can be seen with these countries. On average, in comparison with the\u00a0performance observed in Brazil or in South Africa, technical efficiency of Algerian firms is\u00a0half the level of the firms standing on the frontier and one fifth for Egypt or Lebanese\u00a0organizations. On large sector-based samples that combine firms of a numerous countries,\u00a0stochastic frontier models incorporating a vector of inefficiency determinants have shown the\u00a0statistically influential impact of variables reflecting financing or openness (i.e., the rate of\u00a0exports, the foreign participation to the capital structure of domestic firms). The role of public\u00a0institutions does not prove statistically significant. At least as regard the number of answers,\u00a0information about this factor is quite poor. Most of these factors are appraised through\u00a0qualitative variables that offer a poor approximation of the reality. Although the empirical\u00a0analysis may suffer from an attrition bias because of the limited number of firms for which\u00a0information is available, one may presume that these variables play a significant role in the\u00a0explanation of technical efficiency differences. Moroccan institutions prove better than those\u00a0of other MENA countries. On the different sectors, medians show, for example, that the\u00a0importers has to assume from 2 to 6 days before benefitting their goods against 10 days in\u00a0Egypt and from 15 to 26 days in Algeria.<\/p>\n
From theses studies on the productivity issue than we expressed in absolute (TFP) or\u00a0in relative terms (i.e., technical efficiency scores), one can say that the Moroccan\u00a0manufacturing firms are the most efficient among the Four MENA countries. They are quite\u00a0close to the efficiency scores observed in some countries of a higher level of development\u00a0such as South Africa and Brazil and better that those currently observed in large emerging\u00a0countries such as China or India. The scenario proved different for the three other understudied\u00a0MENA countries. On average, Algerian firms rank second, suffering from poor public\u00a0administrations. The institutional context also handicaps Egyptian and Lebanese firms. In\u00a0these two MENA countries institutional factors including corruption have been a severe\u00a0hindrance. In addition, the poor delivery of public services, especially for electricity, was a\u00a0strong obstacle for promoting productive efficiency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Firm productivity contributes to the competitiveness as well as the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.femise.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4104"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.femise.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.femise.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.femise.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.femise.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4104"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.femise.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5891,"href":"https:\/\/www.femise.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4104\/revisions\/5891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.femise.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.femise.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.femise.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}