Editors’ Introduction

The papers in this collection of works presented at the 2018 North American Productivity Workshop X hosted at the University of Miami, represent contributed, peer reviewed chapters across all areas of efficiency and productivity analysis. They offer new insights and perspectives into the modeling, identification, and estimation of productivity and its major components, efficiency and innovation. The collection is aptly titled Advances in Efficiency and Productivity Analysis. The contributions in this volume speak to firms or agencies that are privately or state-owned, capitalist or centrally planned economies, developed, developing, or transitional countries—anywhere where the goal is to measure productivity and identify and explain possible inefficiencies and thus help a productive enterprise/entity improve and move to higher levels of efficiency and productivity and a more efficient utilization of valuable and costly resources. Productivity growth, as we know, is the main vehicle through which growth in living standards and welfare is achieved. Constraints on this growth, whether by ineffective or misguided regulatory oversight, maldistribution of productivity growth, failure to properly account for hidden costs and benefits of productive decisions and allocations, or market failures to accurately price current resources in light of how their depletion impacts future generations, all contribute to a diminution in productivity growth and thus in living standards. The papers in this volume provide new research findings these issues.