Creative Accounting or Creative Destruction? Firm-level Productivity Growth in Chinese Manufacturing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We present the first comprehensive set of firm-level total factor productivity estimates for China's manufacturing sector that spans her entry into WTO.We find that productivity growth is among the highest compared to other countries.For our preferred estimate, the weighted average annual productivity growth for incumbents is 2.7% for a gross output production function and 7.7% for a value added production function over the period 1998-2006.Of the various sensitivity checks we carry out, controlling for the increase in labor quality and labor hours, as proxied by the rising real wage, has the largest (downward) effect on the productivity estimates.We further document that new entrants are a particularly dynamic force and that firms experience large productivity declines before exiting from the sample.Overall, net entry contributes roughly half to total TFP growth.Aggregate productivity growth, however, is tempered by a much lower effect of reallocation of inputs towards higher productivity firms, compared to the U.S. benchmark.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".