Productivity growth and funding of public service broadcasting

In this paper we demonstrate how standard techniques for measuring productivity growth can be applied to the broadcasting sector to provide a benchmark for reasonable efficiency savings which public finance officials might expect public service broadcasting (PSB) to achieve. Using establishment level data from the UK, we produce estimates of productivity growth amongst commercial broadcasters between 1999 and 2003, which provide some evidence that improvements to PSB can reasonably be expected to be funded by efficiency savings rather than solely by increases in public funding.