"This study provides a new explanation of total factor productivity growth of Taiwanese industry. Besides the channels identified in the literature, this study finds that the venture capital (VC) industry development significantly promotes productivity growth. In addition, an indicator of legal environment has been established to record changes in VC-related legislation during the past two decades in Taiwan. The legal indicator serves as an instrumental variable that can avoid estimation bias resulting from potential endogeneity between VC development and productivity growth. "("JEL "G24, K23, O47). Copyright (c) 2008 Western Economic Association International.

Global budgeting sets a predetermined cap to restrain health expenditure, but the fixed budget for medical providers could result in less efficient services. This paper measures hospital efficiency under global budgeting using simultaneous stochastic frontier analysis, stressing that physicians and dentists within a hospital were under separate budgets in Taiwan. Empirical results show that hospital efficiency was not improved after global budgeting, and physicians were found to be less efficient than dentists. The physicians and dentists within the same hospital were also found to be less integrated after global budgeting. Empirical results show that a joint analysis improves the estimation efficiency from separate analysis and suggest that the aggregate inefficiency came mostly from physicians in hospitals that were small, public, non-teaching, located in small markets and had a low market share. Except for public We thank Subal Kumbhakar and two anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions. We are grateful to

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