IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ptu/wpaper/w200708.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Characteristics of the Portuguese Economic Growth: What has been Missing?

Author

Listed:
  • João Amador
  • Carlos Coimbra

Abstract

This paper analyzes the Portuguese economic growth since the 1960's until present and compares its composition with that of Spain, Greece and Ireland. The average real GDP growth rate in each decade is decomposed as the contribution of input accumulation and total factor productivity. The contribution of labour and capital is separated using computed elasticities and the contribution of total factor productivity is disentangled into technological progress and efficiency. The methodology is based on Bayesian statistical methods and allows the computation of a world translog dynamic stochastic production frontier, which captures the technology that is available to all economies in each period of time. The results obtained are accurate in terms of the contribution of input accumulation and total factor productivity to GDP growth but there is lower precision when separating the contributions of technology growth and efficiency. The results obtained show that Portugal owes most of its economic growth to the accumulation of factors and not to total factor productivity. In particular the contribution of technology to economic growth is substantially lower than what is observed in the other economies considered. It is argued that this may be due to the existence of a low capital-labour ratio, which determines that Portugal is placed in a segment of the world production frontier that does not expand significantly as a result of technological progress. In addition, there is some evidence of modest developments in terms of efficiency which may be associated with the low quality of new inputs relatively to other economies. Another possible explanation for the disappointing performance of the Portuguese economy in the last decade lies in the existence of statistical inaccuracies in the measurement of GDP, especially in what concerns the contribution of some services.

Suggested Citation

  • João Amador & Carlos Coimbra, 2007. "Characteristics of the Portuguese Economic Growth: What has been Missing?," Working Papers w200708, Banco de Portugal, Economics and Research Department.
  • Handle: RePEc:ptu:wpaper:w200708
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.bportugal.pt/sites/default/files/anexos/papers/wp200708.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Santos, Eleonora & Khan, Shahed, 2019. "FDI Policies and Catching-Up," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 0(7(61)), pages 1821-1853.
    2. Ester Gomes da Silva, 2010. "Capital services estimates in Portuguese industries, 1977–2003," Portuguese Economic Journal, Springer;Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestao, vol. 9(1), pages 35-74, April.
    3. International Monetary Fund, 2015. "Portugal: Selected Issues," IMF Staff Country Reports 2015/127, International Monetary Fund.
    4. Santos, Eleonora & Khan, Shahed, 2018. "Public Policies, Innovation and Convergence," EconStor Preprints 183508, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.
    5. António Santos & João Amador, 2020. "Inputs, technology and efficiency: The Portuguese economy in the last three decades," Economic Bulletin and Financial Stability Report Articles and Banco de Portugal Economic Studies, Banco de Portugal, Economics and Research Department.
    6. Carlos Figueira, 2017. "Determinants of the Portuguese GDP stagnation during the 2001-2014 period: an empirical investigation," GEE Papers 0068, Gabinete de Estratégia e Estudos, Ministério da Economia, revised Mar 2017.
    7. Luciana Barbosa, 2017. "Lending relationships and the real economy: evidence in the context of the euro area sovereign debt crisis," Working Papers w201708, Banco de Portugal, Economics and Research Department.
    8. Cláudia Duarte & José R. Maria & Sharmin Sazedj, 2019. "Potential output: How does Portugal compare with the euro area over the last 40 years?," Economic Bulletin and Financial Stability Report Articles and Banco de Portugal Economic Studies, Banco de Portugal, Economics and Research Department.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ptu:wpaper:w200708. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: DEE-NTD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/bdpgvpt.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.