Abstract
The manufacturing sector has played a pivotal role for the development of the economies. Itgenerates jobs, earn foreign reserves by exports and serves domestic economy as well. Given theimportance of manufacturing sector, the performance measurement of this sector has been themain interest of economists, researchers and policymakers. The objective of the present study is tomeasure the performance of small, medium and large scale manufacturing industries. We utilizednon-parametric approach to measure the performance by using survey panel data during 1995-2005. Further, for hypotheses testing, we use bootstrapping approach to test the null ofinsignificant change in the performance measures. We found that small and large scalemanufacturing industries do not significantly change their technological frontier during the studyperiod, while, both are highly efficient due to the better operation and management. Further, forhigh efficiency, the contribution of scale efficiency is larger as compare to the operation andmanagement in case of large scale manufacturing industries. On the other hand, medium scaleindustries significantly shifted their technological frontier and adopted new technology orinnovations, this sector is also efficient due to the better operation and management. However,the performance of all these manufacturing industries in terms of productivity change is notsatisfactory. We conclude that by and large, the manufacturing industry has been endeavoring toimprove its efficiency by expanding production with the help of available resources andadministrative strategies. The conspicuous element is that the firms are reluctant to put resourcesinto R&D which can shift production frontier upward.
Keywords: Small, Medium and Large manufacturing, Performance, DEA, Bootstrapping, Punjab