Rethinking Unconditional Convergence in Manufacturing in the Age of New Technologies

Bilge Erten and Schwank Oliver ()
Additional contact information
Schwank Oliver: Senior Economist, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, New York, NY, USA

Journal of Globalization and Development, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-45

Abstract: We revisit unconditional convergence within manufacturing with a focus on differences in technology intensity across industries. For Latin American and Sub-Saharan African economies, we observe that low-technology and medium-technology intensive industries experience a significantly slower convergence in comparison to high-technology intensive ones. In contrast, we find no evidence of a significant differential for low-technology industries’ convergence in Asian economies, and if anything, we see that medium-technology intensive sectors experience a faster convergence than high-technology industries. In developed economies, we observe that while low-technology industries experience a slightly slower convergence, medium-technology industries converge at similar rates to high-technology industries. We also find that these differences emerge during the period of increased global integration, which exposed developing economies to increased competition both from advanced markets and fast industrializers within the developing world. Finally, we show that differential convergence patterns are stronger after the peak of manufacturing employment share has been reached. We discuss the implications of these trends for the future of development policy making.

Keywords: technology intensity; globalization; convergence; productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/jgd-2020-0011 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

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:bpj:globdv:v:12:y:2021:i:1:p:1-45:n:4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/jgd/html

DOI: 10.1515/jgd-2020-0011

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Globalization and Development is currently edited by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Kevin Gallagher, Jeronim Capaldo, Arjun Jayadev, José Antonio Ocampo and Dani Rodrik

More articles in Journal of Globalization and Development from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().