GTAP Resources: Resource Display
| GTAP Resource #1112 |
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"Past and Future Sources of Productivity Growth in Fibre Drum Manufacturing" by Rutherford, Thomas Abstract Manufacturing productivity has been a significant source of economic growth for the United States over the past 50 years. It remains to be seen whether this will continue into the next fifty years and beyond. This paper provides a case study of the sources of changes in productivity for a specific product over the past fifty years. We formulate a mixed integer programming model of the manufacture of fibre drum shipping containers. We use the model to evaluate manufacturing costs and productivity resulting from new equipment, methods, and management systems. We estimate that between 1950 and 2000 there has been a 70\% reduction in winding and slitting machine hours and a 182\% increase in the output of drum bodies per manhour at the Grief Brothers' plant in Van Wert, Ohio. We estimate that aggregate production costs have declined by 20\% during this time. We find that the most important efficiency improvement has resulted from the introduction of an off-line slitter which removes a bottleneck in the winding process. We use our model to evaluate improvements in the production process which could result from the a particular application of information technologies. We find that optimized scheduling of winding and slitting operations might provide a 13\% increase in machine efficiency and an additional cost savings on the order of 3\% through the efficient joint processing of orders to minimize scrap loss and increase machine throughput. While this efficiency gain is substantially less than what has been observed historically, we feel that it provides some encouraging evidence for further improvements in productivity. |
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- Technological change |
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Public Access  GTAP Resource 1112 (201.8 KB) Replicated: 0 time(s)Restricted Access No documents have been attached. Special Instructions No instructions have been specified. |
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Last Modified: 9/15/2023 2:05:45 PM
