EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Stages of Diversification

Romain Wacziarg and Jean Imbs

Research Papers from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business

Abstract: This paper, studies the evolution of sectoral labor concentration in relation to the level of per capita income. We show that various measures of sectoral concentration follow a U-shaped pattern across a wide variety of data sources: countries first diversify, in the sense that labor is spread more equally across sectors, but there exists, relatively late in the development process, a point at which they start to specialize again. We introduce a model with endogenous costs of trading internationally that provides an explanation for this new empirical fact. The model highlights a trade-off between the benefits of diversification in the context of high trading costs, and the benefits of specialization in a Ricardian sense.

JEL-codes: F15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

Downloads: (external link)
http://gsbapps.stanford.edu/researchpapers/library/rp1653.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Stages of Diversification (2003) Downloads
Working Paper: Stages of Diversification (2003)
Working Paper: Stages of Diversification (2000) Downloads
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:ecl:stabus:1653

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research Papers from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-30
Handle: RePEc:ecl:stabus:1653