Can a red cat catch mice too: a study on chinese productivity from Deng to Hu

This study on the Chinese economy uses stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) methods to estimate industry level productivity from 1980 to 2010. Results suggest that government policy favoring heavy industry and manufacturing led to positive technical change in the respective sectors, contrary to many previous studies using TFP-based methods for growth accounting. Although SFA offers many advantages over TFP, its effectiveness is limited due to data aggregation issues. Moreover, lack of Chinese data presents additional challenges of applying SFA on productivity analysis.