Growing like mushrooms? Sectoral evidence from four large European economies

Carolina Castaldi () and Sandro Sapio
Additional contact information
Carolina Castaldi: Utrecht University
Sandro Sapio: University of Napoli “Parthenope”

A chapter in Schumpeterian Perspectives on Innovation, Competition and Growth, 2009, pp 239-257 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This paper follows a stream of literature on the empirics of sectoral growth rates, originated by Castaldi and Dosi (Income levels and income growth. Some new cross-country evidence and some interpretative puzzles. LEM Working Paper 2004-18, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy,2004) on two-digit international manufacturing and service sectors, and by Sapio and Thoma’s (The growth of industrial sectors: theoretical insights and empirical evidence from U.S. manufacturing. LEM Working Paper 2006-09, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy,2006) study on four-digit U.S. manufacturing industries. Our aim is to discuss the statistical properties of growth rates in light of a ’mushroom vision’ of growth. In our analysis, we focus on the growth of value added in NACE five-digit sectors in France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom between 1995 and 2003. We find that the volatility of sectoral growth rates is negatively correlated with sectoral size, according to a power law, but with steeper slopes than for firms and U.S. sectors. Rescaled sectoral growth rates are well-described by a Laplace distribution in most years. The outcomes of this statistical analysis provide a further empirical foundation to a view of sectoral growth, wherein inter-firm correlations, market concentration, and inter-sectoral feedbacks play a major role.

Keywords: Sectoral growth; Subbotin distribution; Scaling; Manufacturing; Europe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C10 O47 O51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:spr:sprchp:978-3-540-93777-7_14

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783540937777

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-93777-7_14

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().