The Role of the Structural Transformation in Aggregate Productivity

Margarida Duarte and Diego Restuccia ()

No 415, 2006 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: In this paper, we document the reallocation of employment over time between agriculture, manufacturing, and services (the process of structural transformation) and the growth rate of sectoral labor productivity across countries. We find that countries are going through a remarkably similar process of structural transformation, although with a substantial lag for some countries. We investigate whether sectoral differences in labor productivity can account for differences in the process of structural transformation and aggregate productivity across countries. We consider a model of the structural transformation and calibrate it to the experience of the United States. We use the model to measure sectoral labor productivity differences across countries and show that these differences are large and systematic both at a point in time and over time. In particular, labor productivity differences are large in agriculture and services and smaller in manufacturing. We show that the implied sectoral labor productivity differences help explain the process of structural transformation and aggregate productivity experiences across countries

Keywords: Productivity; employment; sectors; countries. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O1 O4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff
Date: 2006-12-03
View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/diegor/research/DR2_paper.pdf main text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Role of the Structural Transformation in Aggregate Productivity (2007)
Working Paper: The Role of the Structural Transformation in Aggregate Productivity (2009)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed006:415

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2006 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics
Address: Society for Economic Dynamics Anne Stubing CV Starr Center for Applied Economics 269 Mercer Street, Room 303 New York University New York, NY 10003
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().