This research paper investigates whether young manufacturing businesses have, or develop, productivity advantage compared to more mature firms.
Key findings include:
- young manufacturing firms in Australia are quite unproductive upon entry
- a small number of businesses grow very fast and have a productivity advantage, these are dubbed 'transformative'
- co-locating with suppliers and clients does not seem to provide firms with much incentive to improve their productivity
- businesses that co-locate with firms in the same industry or start within high-patenting areas have much faster productivity growth than other firms.
The study used data from the Business Longitudinal Analysis Data Environment (BLADE) and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
Author: Sasan Bakhtiari