| Summary: | 博士 === 國立中央大學 === 產業經濟研究所 === 94 === In the dynamic environment of a knowledge-based economy, the global economic environment is changing rapidly. According to the theory of neoclassic school, preserving continued growth of technological progression is the essential key to success of a firm. For example, adoption of a new production technology, new inputs, and other knowledge factors, would change the equilibrium of market structure (Geroski and Pomroy, 1990; Chen, et al., 2000). In the 1990s, Taiwanese manufacturing firms faced a dilemma in that they lacked basic-level labor and technological human capital, and had difficulty-acquiring land as a result of heightened environmental protection awareness. In order to hold their competitive advantage, some industries began to emigrate their businesses from Taiwan to Southeast Asia and Mainland China, and other industries still staying in Taiwan sought to upgrade their technology and industry. In particular, the progress in information technology (IT) and the ongoing application and diffusion of Internet and e-commerce. Therefore, the ability to apply the Internet and electronic technology has become the major opportunity and challenge facing firms (Kambil, 1995).
Therefore, we first explore the issue of whether information technology (IT) investment brings about the Solow productivity paradox. This chapter considers, aside from the general specification of the Cobb-Douglas production function, the impact of augmented labor productivity through IT by applying semiparametric smooth coefficient estimation on the idea that the impact on the total factor productivity (TFP) may not be neutral. Therefore, a generalized semiparametric production function is used to appraise the impact of IT on TFP in general and on labor productivity in particular. Employing the manufacturing firm-level data of Taiwan in 1991, the empirical results show that IT investment provides a significant contribution to productivity and the observed production in the Taiwanese manufacturing firms is
shown to be increasing return to scale. Besides, IT has a significant spillover impact on the labor productivity, particularly for larger and more IT deepening firms.
In Chapter 3 we use a newly constructed panel dataset by Taiwanese manufacturing firms during 1999-2002 to investigate the impact of R&D and e-commerce investments with spillovers and network externalities on capital productivity and labor productivity by applying a non-neutral production function. The empirical results of the system GMM (generalized method of moments) show that: (1) e-commerce and R&D capital tend to have a complementary relationship with respect to productivity; (2) according to cross-effects knowledge capital is the substitute for labor, conversely, knowledge capital is the complement of capital, (3) both e-commerce and R&D capital have a positive impact on productivity; and (4) inter-industry e-commerce network externalities contribute more significantly to productivity than the others do.
In Chapter 4, we investigate the substitute/complementary relationship between the adoption of electronic and automatic technology, by applying the seemingly unrelated bivariate probit model to Taiwanese manufacturing industry during 1999-2002. Furthermore, we detect the impact of the adoption of electronic, automatic technology and their interaction on productivity, with the observations of firms’ adoption decisions in following split data: small, medium, and large; high-tech, and traditional firms. Empirical results show that the decisions of electronic and automatic technology adoption tend to have complementary relationship. The firms with larger size, higher productivity and more innovative activities are more apt to adopt multiple technologies. With the outcomes of significantly positive sign of intra-industry network externalities, we argue that firms adopt electronic technology just due to the increasing competitor pressure or cooperation requirement from related industry. As a result, the adoption of multiple technologies has a great influence on firms’ productivity improvement, particularly to that of high-tech and larger firms.
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