Productivity Accounting
The Economics of Business Performance

Productivity Accounting offers in-depth analysis of variation in business performance, providing an analytical framework which accounts for causes and consequences.

Emili Grifell-Tatjé (Author), C. A. Knox Lovell (Author)

9780521709873, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 26 January 2015

398 pages, 50 b/w illus. 21 tables
22.8 x 15.1 x 2.2 cm, 0.59 kg

'Over the last century, researchers in the fields of accounting, management and economics have studied the links between financial performance, productivity growth, and the distribution of surpluses. The main contribution of this book is providing, for the first time, a complete and rigorous presentation of these links complemented with an extensive literature review that departs from the seminal works on the subject. Professors Grifell-Tatjé and Lovell explain how to evaluate the sources and distribution of economic growth, price changes, and productivity drivers by using information on prices and quantities of inputs and outputs, and by implementing methodologies such as index numbers and frontier analysis. This book will be a reference for researchers, practitioners, and graduate students in the field of productivity accounting.' Sergio Perelman, HEC Management School, University of Liège, Belgium

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.

Subject Areas: Business & management [KJ], Finance [KFF], Accounting [KFC], Economics [KC]