Efeito da produtividade total dos fatores sobre o crescimento e seus determinantes: evidências para países de renda média

Abstract

This work has two main objectives. First, we intend to analyze the role of Total Factor Productivity (PTF) in economic growth, looking at a particular case of a middle-income country, Brazil, from 1960 to 2017, from the application of the decomposition technique growth. The results are consistent with the extensive literature, suggesting that Brazilian PTF is heading towards closing four decades of stagnation. In this case, the contribution occurs in order to bring an update of the PTF estimates, exploring three specifications of the production function: without human capital, with human capital and considering the variables in terms of hours worked. Second, the intention is to analyze the impact of macroeconomic factors, technology transfer and institutional factors on TFP for a sample of 54 middle-income countries. To this end, we opted for System GMM (ARELLANO; BOVER, 1995; BLUNDELL; BOND, 1998) as an estimation method, in order to control the endogeneity problem. There is evidence that inflation negatively affects TFP and that more open economies have higher levels of TFP. From the point of view of institutional factors, regulatory quality was the only factor that contributed to increase aggregate productivity. The main contribution of this part is to direct the analysis of the determinants of aggregate productivity to middle-income countries, including these results may provide clues about potential reforms and policies that allow greater gains in productive efficiency.