The Role of Exit and Entry in Australian Productivity Growth

The central aim of this paper is to report findings from an Australian study of the influence of firm dynamics on labour productivity growth during Australia’s productivity surge in the 1990s. Like studies of other countries, the within-firm effects are found to dominate net entry and exit effects. While the time interval is relatively short (three years) and the representativeness of the sample is open to question, the findings suggest that Australian firms behaved more in line with the “US model” than with the “European model”. The paper also raises a number of data issues in using the Business Longitudinal Survey for this kind of analysis ...