The Performance of Manufacturing in the European Union in the Context of Agricultural Economics - The Agricultural Economics of the 21st Century - page 41

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Fig. 4.1 Productivity of labor (Production value/number of persons employed) growth rate (%) in
averages (over the period 1996-2008 and over the different forms of the manufacturing sector
considered) for the current several countries of the European Union
Lithuania, Romania, Italy, and Slovakia are the countries with the greatest average
labor productivity growth rate.
The figure shows the productivity of labor growth rate (%), also, in averages for
the several forms of the manufacturing sector considered.
Observing Fig. 4.2 , the manufacture of tobacco products (between the manufac-
ture of food products, beverages and tobacco) possesses the greatest average labor
productivity growth rate. On the other hand, the processing and preserving of fish
and fish products show negative values for this variable.
5 Results
Table 4.2 presents the results obtained with the estimations made with panel data
(27 European Union countries and the period 1996-2008) in the Stata software
program. The econometric estimations are realized first with fixed and random
effects methods and after, if necessary, taking into account some statistic tests, with
the ordinary least square. The options for each one of these econometric methods
are effectuated considering the several statistic tests presented in Table 4.2 and are
the most used in these models.
From Table 4.2 it is possible to conclude that the manufacturing sector across the
current 27 European Union countries presents strong increasing returns to scale,
considering the value of the Verdoorn coefficient (0.945) for the fixed effects
econometric method (considering that the Hausman test (13.310) reject the random
effects). On the other hand, the coefficient of the constant does not present statistic