The Accounting Information Usage in Measuring Productivity Growth and Evaluating Business Performance

The main objective of this research is to measure productivity variations and performance of 28 companies listed on Tehran stock exchange from automobile and parts industry using financial statements information during the period of 2006-2010. In order to attain this goal, the Malmquist index and DEA have been used, the labor force and the fixed assets stand for inputs and the economic value added represents the only output. The results indicated that variations in the company’s performance are due to the change in technical efficiency and technology. Because the productivity and performance of the firms revealed an improvement in two years so that in one year, the efficiency was the prominent factor and in the other year, both of technical efficiency and technology jointly played an important role in this progress. In addition, over the two another years, the firms had not experienced any performance progress and finally in one year, they encountered regressive performance. The reason for this declining performance can be found in technology downfall. Among other results of this research is that the surveyed firms totally experienced productivity progress, although his growth was slight. The reason can be attributed to the negligible technical efficiency growth. Therefore, it can be concluded that technical efficiency improvement by patterning benchmark firms has an important role in productivity and performance improvement. Of course, the critical role of technology growth through the renewing and modernizing facilities should not be overlooked.