Managerial ability and productivity changes in the Chinese high-tech industries: a data envelopment analysis approach

Purpose This paper intends to investigate managerial ability and productivity changes in the Chinese high-tech industries. The research is based on 182 industry-year observations in China spread over seven years, 2011–2017. Design/methodology/approach A meta-frontier-based productivity index is proposed to evaluate the utility and productivity changes. Then, a two-stage procedure (involving the calculation of technical efficiencies of the provincial high-tech industries at the first stage and the use of regression analysis in the second stage) is applied to estimate the managerial ability of industries. Findings The results revealed that the overall efficiency of China’s high-tech industries is relatively low. It has been shown that there is a slight productivity growth in the high-tech industry in China from 2011 to 2017. It has also been shown that the managerial ability of the industries has a significant impact on productivity growth; however, the weakness in managerial ability has led to a decrease in efficiency. From the perspective of region, managerial ability in the Central region was better than the other two regions, while overall efficiency in the East region was better than Central and west regions. Originality/value This study adds value to existing knowledge on performance and managerial ability estimation in the framework of data envelopment analysis. This is the first attempt (1) to employ a modified Malmquist productivity index to compute productivity changes in China’s high-tech industries and (2) to apply a two-stage procedure to compute managerial ability of the industries in different years.