Productivity Accounting
The Economics of Business Performance

The productivity of a business exerts an important influence on its financial performance. A similar influence exists for industries and economies: those with superior productivity performance thrive at the expense of others. Productivity performance helps explain the growth and demise of businesses and the relative prosperity of nations. Productivity Accounting: The Economics of Business Performance offers an in-depth analysis of variation in business performance, providing the reader with an analytical framework within which to account for this variation and its causes and consequences. The primary focus is the individual business, and the principal consequence of business productivity performance is business financial performance. Alternative measures of financial performance are considered, including profit, profitability, cost, unit cost, and return on assets. Combining analytical rigor with empirical illustrations, the analysis draws on wide-ranging literatures, both historical and current, from business and economics, and explains how businesses create value and distribute it.

1. Introduction; 2. Profitability change: its generation and distribution; 3. Decomposing the productivity-change and price-recovery-change components of profitability change; 4. Profit change: its generation and distribution; 5. Decomposing the quantity-change and price-change components of profit change; 6. Decomposing the productivity-change component of profit change; 7. Productivity and cost; 8. Productivity, capacity utilization, and return on assets.

Emili Grifell-Tatjé is currently Professor of Management and Business Economics in the Department of Business at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and former head of department and academic director of the doctoral programme in Economics, Management and Organization. He has received research grants from academic and private institutions, and has been awarded visiting appointments by various universities around the world. Professor Grifell-Tatjé has published in a wide range of academic journals.
C. A. Knox Lovell is Honorary Professor with the Centre for Efficiency and Productivity Analysis in the School of Economics at the University of Queensland. He served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Productivity Analysis for a decade. He has authored several books, including Production Frontiers (with Färe and Grosskopf) and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (with Kumbhakhar) for Cambridge University Press.