earticle

영어

Productivity improvement of manufacturing industry has been the primal engine of the national economic growth. The primal objective of this study is to investigate the productivity performance of the Korean manufacturing industry for the past two decades. Tornqvist discrete approximation is used to calculate productivity growth rate and factor contributions to the economic growth from labor and capital input. The empirical results showed that the productivity growth has not been the major contributing factor in the growth of the Korean manufacturing industry for the past two decades. We also investigate the relationship among productivity growth rate, R&D, and information technology. With a simple regression approach, we found that R&D has resulted in the positive effect on the productivity growth, while expenditure on the information technology has not provided noticeable positive effect. From the empirical results, we know that more attention should be focused on the environment or infrastructure in which the information technology is used rather than on the absolute size of the expenditure on the information technology.