Trade Arrangements, Productivity Growth and Firm Level Efficiency: A Comparative Review of Textiles and Clothing Industries in Australia and Bangladesh

Textiles and clothing industries play significant role during the embryonic stages of development, but free trade in textiles was limited through protective measures, such as the Multi Fibre Arrangement (MFA). From the 1990's, as trade restrictions were eliminated, small players in the world market such as Australia and Bangladesh were faced with a number of policy questions. This book provides an analytical overview of the impact of globalisation, microeconomic reform and firm-level responses for the textiles and clothing industries in the two economies. Dynamic comparative advantage and product life cycle hypothesis has been analysed with estimation of revealed comparative advantage (Balassa, 1965) for selected developed and developing economies. Subsectoral performance has been evaluated with productivity measured using both parametric and non-parametric techniques. Tornqvist's (1936) non parametric superlative index with underlying flexible form translog function, as popularised by Diewert (1976, 1978), has been used to index output, input and TFP growth. Stochastic frontier functions are used to examine firm level efficiencies and the factors causing efficiency variations.