Abstract
In the aftermath of the Global and Financial Crisis, between 2013 and 2015, the Portuguese government revoked four holidays for both public sector and private employees. We test whether the revocation had an effect on labour productivity in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in Portugal. Moreover, we also study whether such effects are different taking into account the SOEs managed by the Central Government or the Local and Regional Governments. Our results show that revocation of holidays did not impact labour productivity for either central or local and regional government managed SOEs. Though revocation of holidays espoused to improve productivity, the policy seems to have served a ceremonial purpose, but not an economic one.
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Notes
Naturally, it is not straightforward to assess the productivity in some industries (i.e. tertiary sector), In addition, if one used output per hour (for which we do not have the data for the sample at hand), to measure labour productivity, the fact that a worker is asked to work more of fewer days, can still have a different response from the labour force. Indeed, workers might react differently in terms of intensity and productivity.
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Acknowledgements
We thank two anonymous referees for their very useful suggestions. The authors acknowledge financial support from FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Portugal) and for national funding through research Grants UIDB/05069/2020 and UIDB/04521/2020. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of their employers.
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Afonso, A., Guedes, M.J. & Patel, P.C. Labour Productivity in State-Owned Enterprises. Comp Econ Stud 63, 450–465 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41294-021-00148-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41294-021-00148-1