Structural Transformation and Quality Ladders: Solving the “Theil's Cube”

Andrey Gnidchenko

HSE Working papers from National Research University Higher School of Economics

Abstract: We propose a decomposition of weighted Theil index of export concentration into the quantity- and quality-driven terms and calculate the proposed components for 5038 product groups and 120 countries. We link our findings to the debate on the role of quality upgrading in structural transformation. The results do not support the idea that climbing quality ladders (or quality upgrading within the actually exported products) is the best way to proceed with structural transformation: for most countries, the share of the quality-driven component of weighted Theil index doesn’t exceed 20 per cent

Keywords: structural transformation; diversification; international trade; Theil index; unit values; quality ladders. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C43 F10 F14 L16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in WP BRP Series: Economics / EC, July 2019, pages 1-15

Downloads: (external link)
https://wp.hse.ru/data/2019/07/11/1478911438/218EC2019.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hig:wpaper:218/ec/2019

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HSE Working papers from National Research University Higher School of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Shamil Abdulaev () and Shamil Abdulaev ().