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Elasticity Of Substitution And The Stagnation Of Italian Productivity, Enrico Saltari, Daniela Federici
Elasticity Of Substitution And The Stagnation Of Italian Productivity, Enrico Saltari, Daniela Federici
Enrico Saltari
The aim of this paper is to investigate the roots of the stagnation in the Italian total factor productivity (TFP). The analysis focuses on the specific pattern of technical progress in determining the dynamics of the TFP. This analysis cannot be done with Cobb-Douglas technology, but requires the employment of a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production function that allows distinguishing between the direction and the bias of technical progress. We employ a CES specification embodying both labor- and capital-augmenting technical change, with a σ less than 1. We obtain three main results. (1) There seems to have been a …