Distribuição de produtividades - Parte I

Ele há coisas tão absurdas, mas tão absurdas, que só podem ser aceites por quem vive em estufas e redomas afastado da realidade.
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O arranque deste texto "Productivity Dynamics in Manufacturing Plants" de Martin Neil Baily, Charles Hulten, David Campbell, Timothy Bresnahan e Richard E. Caves, publicado por Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. Microeconomics, Vol. 1992 (1992), pp. 187-267, é de chorar de gozo por um lado e de preocupação por outro.
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De gozo porque não há nada de mais afastado da realidade e, de preocupação porque se imaginam quantos modelos mentais, quantas decisões são tomadas tendo por base linhas de orientação deste tipo:
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"Much of the traditional analysis of productivity growth in manufacturing industries has been based explicitly or implicitly on a model in which identical, perfectly competitive plants respond in the same way to forces that strike the industry as a whole. The estimates of growth obtained with this framework are then used as the basis for discussions of policy concerning capital accumulation, research and development, trade, or other issues. (Moi ici: Tolice pegada, como recorda a série do Senhor dos Perdões) This contrasts markedly with the literature of industrial organization in which perfect competition is seen as an unusual market structure and in which the differences among firms are examined in detail."
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"We will explore the heterogeneity among plants to see how individual plants move within an industry, which plants account for most of the productivity growth, and how important entry and exit are to industry growth.
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As we have examined this data, we have been impressed by the diversity among plants and among industries. Some industries in our sample have achieved huge improvements in productivity; in others productivity has fallen sharply. There are high-productivity entrants and low-productivity entrants, high-productivity exiters and low-productivity exiters, plants that move up rapidly in the productivity distribution and plants that move down rapidly. Many plants stay put in the distribution. Both in level of and rate of change in productivity, plants manifest significant differences. The aggregate productivity performance of the manufacturing sector reflects the average of diverse economic outcomes at the plant level." (Moi ici: A vida real é assim, plena de diversidade, plena de diferença, impossível de conter dentro das equações que retratam modelos artificiais onde se simulam realidades que não existem)
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Continua.