In economic development, structural change among the three main sectors of an economy accompanies with aggregate economic growth. Nevertheless the question whether economic growth causes structural change or change in the economic structure causes aggregate growth is still unanswered. To shed some more light on this issue, this study examines a Grangercausality test in a panel environment to de...

A growing literature relies on natural experiments to establish causal effects in macroeconomics. In diverse applications, natural experiments have been used to verify underlying assumptions of conventional models, quantify specific model parameters, and identify mechanisms that have major effects on macroeconomic quantities but are absent from conventional models. We discuss and compare the us...

Article history: Received 5 August 2009 Available online 23 November 2010 In this paper we apply a model of early industrialization to the case of New Zealand and Uruguay in 1870–1940. We show how differences in agricultural institutions may have produced different development paths in two countries which were similar under many respects. While in New Zealand the active role of the Crown in reg...

South Africa simultaneously lost more than 890,000 jobs and increased the number of skilled workers from 1989 to 1999. We argue this is the consequence of well-documented acute apartheidera distortions which led to a current coordination failure where (i) firms are locked into a mostly skill-intensive technology where they have very little demand for semi-skilled and unskilled labor, and (ii) t...

In every developed country, the economic transition from pre-industrial stagnation to modern growth was accompanied by a demographic transition from high to low fertility. Even though the overall pattern is repeated, there are large cross-country variations in the timing and speed of the demographic transition. What accounts for falling fertility during the transition to growth? To answer this ...

The labour productivity differentials between manufacturing firms in Ghana and South Korea exceed those implied by macro analysis. Median value-added per employee is nearly 40 times higher in South Korea than Ghana. The most important single factor in explaining this difference is the Mincerian return to skills which differ by a factor of three between Ghana and South Korea. There is no signifi...

Many technologies used by the LDCs are developed in the OECD economies and are designed to make optimal use of the skills of these richer countries’ workforces. Differences in the supply of skills create a mismatch between the requirements of these technologies and the skills of LDC workers, and lead to low productivity in the LDCs. Even when all countries have equal access to new technologies,...

In this paper, I analyze a dynamic model of a firm’s joint decisions to export and innovate, allowing both decisions to affect the firm’s production in accordance with selfselection and learning-by-exporting theories of firm-level export and production dynamics. I calibrate the model using Chilean manufacturing plant data from 2005 to 2007 and find that self-selection and learning-by-exporting ...

We study whether the effects on registered manufacturing output of dismantling the License Raj — a system of central controls regulating entry and production activity in this sector — vary across Indian states with different labor market regulations. The effects are found to be unequal across Indian states with different labor market regulations. In particular, following delicensing, industries...