Patterns of Technical Change and De-Industrialization

Xiao Jiang () and Luis Villanueva ()

PSL Quarterly Review, 2018, vol. 71, issue 285, 161-182

Abstract: Using a classical political economy approach we find aggregate regularities in the patterns of technical change followed by high income and developing countries (mostly from Latin America and Sub Saharan Africa) respectively. Such regularities allow us to propose an alternative definition of de-industrialization and study the issue of “premature de-industrialization†from a political economy perspective. In the (capital productivity, labor productivity) plane, a characteristic trajectory of high-income countries typically fluctuates in the quadrant where labor productivity growth rates are positive while capital productivity growth rates are negative (the industrialization quadrant). De-industrializing countries, on the other hand, have transitioned from the quadrant with positive labor productivity growth rates and negative capital productivity growth rates to the opposite quadrant (with negative labor productivity and positive capital productivity growth) and remained in this quadrant during the 1980s and 1990s. Both groups of countries, high income and de-industrializing seem to follow a cyclical pattern, revealing that the rate of industrialization is constantly fluctuating with varying labor and capital productivity growth rates

Keywords: patterns of technical change; de-industrialization; Classical Political Economy; labor productivity; capital productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B12 O33 O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ojs.uniroma1.it/index.php/PSLQuarterlyReview/article/view/14001/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:psl:pslqrr:2018:23

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.pslquarterlyreview.info

Access Statistics for this article

PSL Quarterly Review is currently edited by Alessandro Roncaglia and Carlo D'Ippoliti

More articles in PSL Quarterly Review from Economia civile
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Carlo D'Ippoliti ().