Determinants of total factor productivity growth of Tunisian manufacturing firms

Using a panel of Tunisian manufacturing firms observed over the 1998-2006 period, The purpose of this paper was to decompose the total factor productivity (TFP) growth into technological progress and changes in technical efficiency taking advantage of the DEA-based Malmquist productivity index. Recent developments in bootstrapping techniques are used to give more insight concerning the significance of the point estimates from the linear programming and total factor productivity estimates. Results show that, in average, technical efficiency score is around 59% which implies that the firms in our sample can, on average, increase production by 41% using the same levels of inputs in order to match the frontier. Across industries, TFP growth has been heterogeneous. TFP of manufacturing sector increased in average by 7.55% over the period 1998-2006. This performance was due mainly to technical efficiency change (5.77%) and a relatively low technological change (1,67%).