Productivity Accounting: The Economics of Business Performance

Description

The productivity of a business exerts an important influence on its financial performance. A similar influence exists for industries and economies: those with superior productivity performance thrive at the expense of others. Productivity performance helps explain the growth and demise of businesses and the relative prosperity of nations. Productivity Accounting: The Economics of Business Performance offers an in-depth analysis of variation in business performance, providing the reader with an analytical framework within which to account for this variation and its causes and consequences. The primary focus is the individual business, and the principal consequence of business productivity performance is business financial performance. Alternative measures of financial performance are considered, including profit, profitability, cost, unit cost, and return on assets. Combining analytical rigor with empirical illustrations, the analysis draws on wide-ranging literatures, both historical and current, from business and economics, and explains how businesses create value and distribute it.

Emili Grifell-Tatje is currently Professor of Management and Business Economics in the Department of Business at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, and former head of department and academic director of the doctoral programme in Economics, Management and Organization. He has received research grants from academic and private institutions, and has been awarded visiting appointments by various universities around the world. Professor Grifell-Tatje has published in a wide range of academic journals. C. A. Knox Lovell is Honorary Professor with the Centre for Efficiency and Productivity Analysis in the School of Economics at the University of Queensland. He served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Productivity Analysis for a decade. He has authored several books, including Production Frontiers (with Fare and Grosskopf) and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (with Kumbhakhar) for Cambridge University Press.

'The central theme of this book is decomposition. With chirurgical precision the authors dissect change of profitability, profit, cost, and return-on-assets, looking for traces of productivity change. They are thereby interested not only in the drivers of productivity change, but also in the distribution of its fruits. As a result the book turns out to be a tasty blend of economics, statistics, and business performance measurement. In addition, quite a number of lesser known treasures from history were unearthed. This is a rich book, both for theorists and practitioners.' Bert M. Balk, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University 'Over the last century, researchers in the fields of accounting, management and economics have studied the links between financial performance, productivity growth, and the distribution of surpluses. The main contribution of this book is providing, for the first time, a complete and rigorous presentation of these links complemented with an extensive literature review that departs from the seminal works on the subject. Professors Grifell-Tatje and Lovell explain how to evaluate the sources and distribution of economic growth, price changes, and productivity drivers by using information on prices and quantities of inputs and outputs, and by implementing methodologies such as index numbers and frontier analysis. This book will be a reference for researchers, practitioners, and graduate students in the field of productivity accounting.' Sergio Perelman, HEC Management School, University of Liege, Belgium