Structural Change and Productivity Growth 20 Years Later
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Published: 2008
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13:
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Globalization, structural change and productivity growth
Author: Margaret Stokes McMillan
Publisher:
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 32
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLarge gaps in labor productivity between the traditional and modern parts of the economy are a fundamental reality of developing societies. In this paper, we document these gaps, and emphasize that labor flows from low-productivity activities to high-productivity activities are a key driver of development. Our results show that since 1990 structural change has been growth reducing in both Africa and Latin America, with the most striking changes taking place in Latin America. The bulk of the difference between these countries' productivity performance and that of Asia is accounted for by differences in the pattern of structural change - with labor moving from low- to high-productivity sectors in Asia, but in the opposite direction in Latin America and Africa. In our empirical work, we identify three factors that help determine whether (and the extent to which) structural change contributes to overall productivity growth. In countries with a relatively large share of natural resources in exports, structural change has typically been growth reducing. Even though these "enclave" sectors usually operate at very high productivity, they cannot absorb the surplus labor from agriculture. By contrast, competitive or undervalued exchange rates and labor market flexibility have contributed to growth enhancing structural change.
Structural Reforms, Productivity and Technological Change in Latin America
Author: Jorge M. Katz
Publisher: United Nations Publications
Published: 2001
Total Pages: 164
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the last ten to fifteen years, profound structural reforms have moved Latin America and the Caribbean from closed, state-dominated economies to ones that are more market-oriented and open. Policymakers expected that these changes would speed up growth. This book is part of a multi-year project to determine whether these expectation have been fulfilled. Focusing on technological change, the impact of the reforms on the process of innovation is examined. It notes that the development process is proving to be highly heterogenous across industries, regions and firms and can be described as strongly inequitable. This differentiation that has emerged has implications for job creation, trade balance, and the role of small and medium sized firms. This ultimately suggests, amongst other things, the need for policies to better spread the use of new technologies.
Productivity, Technology and Economic Growth
Author: Bart van Ark
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2013-03-09
Total Pages: 408
ISBN-13: 1475731612
DOWNLOAD EBOOKProductivity, Technology and Economic Growth presents a selection of recent research advances on long term economic growth. While the contributions stem from both economic history, macro- and microeconomics and the economics of innovation, all papers depart from a common viewpoint: the key factor behind long term growth is productivity, and the latter is primarily driven by technological change. Most contributions show implicitly or explicitly that technological change is at least partly dependent on growth itself. Furthermore, technology appears to interact strongly with investment in physical and human capital as well as with changes in historical, political and institutional settings. Together these papers are an up-to-date account of the remarkable convergence in theoretical and empirical work on productivity and growth over the past decades. The first part deals with the characteristics of growth regimes over longer periods, ranging from 20 years to two centuries. The next four chapters study the determinants of productivity growth and, in some cases, productivity slowdown during the last quarter of the twentieth century. The final five chapters focus on the role of technology and innovation as the key determinants of growth. Productivity, Technology and Economic Growth is, therefore, a welcome collection for academic scholars and graduate students in economics, history and related social sciences as well as for policy makers.
Structural Change and Productivity Growth
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Total Pages: 0
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DOWNLOAD EBOOKKuznets beyond Kuznets
Author: Saumik Paul
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Published: 2018-12-18
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 4899741006
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSimon Kuznets’ views about the inverted-U relationship between inequality and development and the process of structural transformation have long been under the lens of researchers. Over the last 20 years, immense potential for growth in Asia has been facilitated by structural transformation. However, it remains undecided whether the contribution of structural transformation will stay as a crucial factor in determining potential productivity growth and income distribution. This book brings together novel conceptual frameworks and empirical evidence from country case studies on topics related to structural transformation, globalization, and income inequality.
Global Productivity
Author: Alistair Dieppe
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Published: 2021-06-09
Total Pages: 552
ISBN-13: 1464816093
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe COVID-19 pandemic struck the global economy after a decade that featured a broad-based slowdown in productivity growth. Global Productivity: Trends, Drivers, and Policies presents the first comprehensive analysis of the evolution and drivers of productivity growth, examines the effects of COVID-19 on productivity, and discusses a wide range of policies needed to rekindle productivity growth. The book also provides a far-reaching data set of multiple measures of productivity for up to 164 advanced economies and emerging market and developing economies, and it introduces a new sectoral database of productivity. The World Bank has created an extraordinary book on productivity, covering a large group of countries and using a wide variety of data sources. There is an emphasis on emerging and developing economies, whereas the prior literature has concentrated on developed economies. The book seeks to understand growth patterns and quantify the role of (among other things) the reallocation of factors, technological change, and the impact of natural disasters, including the COVID-19 pandemic. This book is must-reading for specialists in emerging economies but also provides deep insights for anyone interested in economic growth and productivity. Martin Neil Baily Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution Former Chair, U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers This is an important book at a critical time. As the book notes, global productivity growth had already been slowing prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and collapses with the pandemic. If we want an effective recovery, we have to understand what was driving these long-run trends. The book presents a novel global approach to examining the levels, growth rates, and drivers of productivity growth. For anyone wanting to understand or influence productivity growth, this is an essential read. Nicholas Bloom William D. Eberle Professor of Economics, Stanford University The COVID-19 pandemic hit a global economy that was already struggling with an adverse pre-existing condition—slow productivity growth. This extraordinarily valuable and timely book brings considerable new evidence that shows the broad-based, long-standing nature of the slowdown. It is comprehensive, with an exceptional focus on emerging market and developing economies. Importantly, it shows how severe disasters (of which COVID-19 is just the latest) typically harm productivity. There are no silver bullets, but the book suggests sensible strategies to improve growth prospects. John Fernald Schroders Chaired Professor of European Competitiveness and Reform and Professor of Economics, INSEAD
Growth and Structural Transformation
Author: Kwang Suk Kim
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2020-03-17
Total Pages: 224
ISBN-13: 1684172195
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis study provides a comprehensive overview of Korea’s macroeconomic growth and structural change since World War II, and traces some of the roots of development to the colonial period. The authors explore in detail colonial development, changing national income patterns, relative price shifts, sources of aggregate growth, and sources of sectoral structural change, comparing them with other countries.
The Oxford Handbook of Structural Transformation
Author: Célestin Monga
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-02-06
Total Pages: 608
ISBN-13: 0192512684
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Oxford Handbook of Structural Transformation addresses the economics of structural transformation around the world. It deals with major themes, which include history and context, critical issues and concepts, methodological foundations, main theoretical approaches, policy issues, some illuminating country experiences of structural transformation, and important debates on the respective roles of the market and the state in that process. The historical record provides a challenge for economists to understand the success of the rising economic powers (some of them initially considered unlikely candidates for prosperity) and the stagnation or decline of others. Five major questions emerge: · Why has so much divergence occurred among nations of the world since the Industrial Revolution, and particularly during the 20th century? · Why has the pattern changed recently with the emergence of a few developing economies (e.g. the multi-polar world), and can it be sustained? · What are the key drivers, strategies, and policies, to foster structural transformation in various different country contexts and in a constantly evolving global economy? · How could low- and middle-income countries avoid development traps and learn from past experiences whilst exploiting the new opportunities offered by the Fourth Industrial Revolution? · What is the role of various development stakeholders and other important players in facilitating sustained economic convergence among nations? This book addresses these questions, bringing the rigor, usefulness, and multi-disciplinary scope of the Oxford Handbook series to a critical topic in economics. The Oxford Handbook of Structural Transformation is an essential reference work and a stimulus to new research and creativity across all branches of the social sciences.
Structural Transformation from a Microeconomic View
Author: Mayuko Kondo
Publisher:
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 168
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKStructural transformation and corresponding labor productivity growth are fundamentals of economic development. This dissertation, titled Structural Transformation from A Microeconomic View, explores the path of the structural transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). In the last 20 years in SSA, structural transformation was not always accompanied by overall labor productivity growth. The first essay of this dissertation, titled Education, Profitability, and Household Labor Allocation in Rural Uganda, explores the microeconomic factors that explain non-growing-productivity structural change with a focus on the role of education. I jointly estimate household hourly profit (wage) and labor supply functions. The estimation result is supportive of the hypothesis that the level of education, profitability of an activity, and time allocation to that activity can be not positively correlated while education positively increases total household profit from the activity. To trigger structural transformation, the governments of SSA and donors have allocated a vast amount of resources into agricultural programs for over 20 years. Aggregate agriculture productivity, however, has shown little growth in the last 20 years. Yet the share of employment in agriculture has constantly decreased since 2000. Whether agriculture productivity growth advances the labor shift from the agriculture sector to the non-agriculture sector is still an open question and of great interest for efficient investment in agriculture development and the economic growth of the countries. The second essay, titled Land and Labor Bias of Farm Technology and the Household's Labor Allocation Decisions, explores the effect of land- and labor-augmenting farm technologies on the household's labor decisions. I provide a theoretical model to describe the household responses to land- and labor-augmenting farm technical change. I classify agricultural households into six regimes based on the participation in on- and off-farm labor markets and the constraint of off-farm work opportunities. I derive propositions to examine the behaviors of the households in each regime. In the empirical part of the study, I apply the model to microeconomic data from Tanzania to test the propositions. The estimation results show that for Tanzanian maize farmers, the adoption of land-augmenting technology, that is organic fertilizer, inorganic fertilizer, or irrigation, increases on-farm labor and decreases off-farm labor while the adoption of labor-augmenting technology, including sprayers, pesticides, herbicides, animal traction, or tractors, decreases on-farm labor and increases off-farm labor when the elasticity of substitution between labor and land is sufficiently large. Taken together, these essays shed light on important policy implications for the acceleration of structural transformation in SSA. The estimation result from the first essay suggests that the expansion of the industry in which higher levels of education increase profitability of work would pull laborers from farming into nonfarm activities. Relaxing the labor market constraints of individuals, especially from relatively less educated households, would shift hours of labor allocation from less profitable activities towards more profitable activities. Also, raising household incomes or standard of living would increase the preference of individuals for leisure relative to income, and increase the optimal marginal productivity of labor, and consequently the profitability of labor. The second essay provides evidence that depending on the conditions of a country such as the level of elasticity of substitution between land and labor and the constraints around off-farm work opportunities, labor-augmenting agricultural technologies have a good potential for speeding up the structural transformation.
