Thoughts on Productivity, Efficiency, and Capacity Utilization Measurement,
with Specific Application to Fisheries
By Catherine J. Morrison Paul
ABSTRACT
The measurement of economic performance, and particularly of productivity, efficiency, and capacity utilization, has evolved significantly in the past two decades. Previous methods often focused on characterizing residuals of output to input growth, or potential to actual output production. More attention has recently been paid to explicitly specifying the factors driving these "measures of our ignorance", and thus to facilitate interpretation and application of these measures. Increasing care has been taken to identify deviations between measured and true economic prices and quantities of inputs and outputs, to decompose general "technical change" or "inefficiency" into its underlying factors. The importance of a detailed representation of various internal and external technological relationships - in particular factors such as scale economies and externalities - has also been highlighted. And the careful definition of potential ("best practice" or "capacity") output, as well as the key role of recognizing output composition changes, has been stressed. This presentation will overview some of the issues that have recently been targeted in the general productivity literature, as well as the recently expanding literature on performance - especially capacity utilization - in fisheries. A particular focus of discussion will be on the importance of stochastic measures for performance measurement in industries such as fisheries, of representing as many input-output interactions as possible in production structure models, and of careful definition and interpretation of notions such as "inefficiency" and "capacity".
 View Full Paper (PDF file)
View Measuring Capacity: Overview and Definitional Issues Session
|
Instructions for authors
