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Author: Junmin Liao Publisher: ISBN: Category : Electronic dissertations Languages : en Pages : 166
Book Description
This dissertation focuses on the macro determinants of economic transformation, and their impact on productivity. The first chapter analyzes the underlying mechanisms that explain the rise of the service sector in China. Along with China's unprecedented growth, the rapid expansion of its service sector is one of the fastest among emerging countries. However, the literature has yet to offer a clear understanding of such expansion. I show that distribution services first grow with the manufacturing sector, followed by personal services as per capita income rises. Motivated by this growth pattern, this chapter provides a theory that describes 1) the complementarity between distribution services and the manufacturing sector, and 2) the substitution between personal services and home production. Quantitative results show that the personal service sector is the key to account for the early and rapid rise of the service sector in China. High productivity growth and high capital intensity in the personal service sector, and labor market frictions are the most important channels. By revealing the growth pattern of the service sector in the early stages of development, the paper thereby contributes to the growing literature on the rising importance of the service economy. The second chapter studies the role of labor reallocation in explaining the increasingly high aggregate investment rate in China. I build a multi-sector general equilibrium model with non-homothetic preferences to establish a link between labor reallocation and the rising investment rate. As agricultural surplus labor move into the non-agricultural sector, which accumulates capital faster, capital return is sustained at a high level. The quantitative analysis supports that the massive labor reallocation from agriculture to non- agriculture accounts for a substantial portion of the high investment rate. The third chapter describes and quantifies the role of financial frictions in explaining agricultural productivity differences across regions. We construct PPP-adjusted sector-level data across provinces in China and find large agricultural and aggregate productivity differences between rich regions and poor regions. We then explore household-level survey data and find severe borrowing constraints in rural areas. Limited credit in poor areas depresses the use of intermediate inputs and hence encourages the use of labor input. As a consequence, workers in poor areas are kept in the agricultural sector and agricultural labor productivity remains low. We use a two-sector general equilibrium model featuring non-homothetic preferences, intermediate inputs and limited commitment to explain and quantify the importance of financial development in rural China. Our model predictions are broadly consistent with the empirical evidence from the literature. The quantitative analyses show that credit constraints account for a substantial part of agricultural employment share and labor productivity differences.
Author: Junmin Liao Publisher: ISBN: Category : Electronic dissertations Languages : en Pages : 166
Book Description
This dissertation focuses on the macro determinants of economic transformation, and their impact on productivity. The first chapter analyzes the underlying mechanisms that explain the rise of the service sector in China. Along with China's unprecedented growth, the rapid expansion of its service sector is one of the fastest among emerging countries. However, the literature has yet to offer a clear understanding of such expansion. I show that distribution services first grow with the manufacturing sector, followed by personal services as per capita income rises. Motivated by this growth pattern, this chapter provides a theory that describes 1) the complementarity between distribution services and the manufacturing sector, and 2) the substitution between personal services and home production. Quantitative results show that the personal service sector is the key to account for the early and rapid rise of the service sector in China. High productivity growth and high capital intensity in the personal service sector, and labor market frictions are the most important channels. By revealing the growth pattern of the service sector in the early stages of development, the paper thereby contributes to the growing literature on the rising importance of the service economy. The second chapter studies the role of labor reallocation in explaining the increasingly high aggregate investment rate in China. I build a multi-sector general equilibrium model with non-homothetic preferences to establish a link between labor reallocation and the rising investment rate. As agricultural surplus labor move into the non-agricultural sector, which accumulates capital faster, capital return is sustained at a high level. The quantitative analysis supports that the massive labor reallocation from agriculture to non- agriculture accounts for a substantial portion of the high investment rate. The third chapter describes and quantifies the role of financial frictions in explaining agricultural productivity differences across regions. We construct PPP-adjusted sector-level data across provinces in China and find large agricultural and aggregate productivity differences between rich regions and poor regions. We then explore household-level survey data and find severe borrowing constraints in rural areas. Limited credit in poor areas depresses the use of intermediate inputs and hence encourages the use of labor input. As a consequence, workers in poor areas are kept in the agricultural sector and agricultural labor productivity remains low. We use a two-sector general equilibrium model featuring non-homothetic preferences, intermediate inputs and limited commitment to explain and quantify the importance of financial development in rural China. Our model predictions are broadly consistent with the empirical evidence from the literature. The quantitative analyses show that credit constraints account for a substantial part of agricultural employment share and labor productivity differences.
Author: Zongye Huang Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
"This thesis intends to address questions that are related to structural transformation, trade, and economic growth. The following three essays sequentially investigate three interesting topics that involve these themes. The first essay investigates the structural transformation in the United States from 1950 to 2005. In particular, we emphasize the role of trade in this process. We develop and calibrate a three-sector model to evaluate the contributions of various factors. It shows that, in addition to traditional explanations, such as non-homothetic preference and sector-biased productivity progress, international trade is another major source of structural change and is able to explain about 35.5 percent of the overall labor share decrease in American manufacturing. A further decomposition exercise estimates that inter-sector trade makes a moderate contribution, while trade imbalances dominate the trade channel and account for the recent contraction of employment in the U.S. manufacturing sector. This result supports the argument that persistent trade deficits have a substantial impact on labor allocations.The second essay analyzes the connection between two key variables, the manufacturing employment share and the investment rate, during economic development. Empirical observations document that both of them exhibit a hump-shaped pattern as income increases. Following the recent research on agricultural technology adoption, I propose that the modernization of agriculture is the primary mechanism that forms these two hump-shaped patterns simultaneously, thus, unbalanced technology growth is unnecessary to derive such a hump-shaped pattern. This simple cause helps to explain the similarity of structural transformation processes across countries. The long-run equilibrium of our model is on a generalized balanced growth path as defined by Kongsamut, Rebelo, and Xie (2001). In the third essay, we explore the interaction between trade and growth. In particular, we assume that the information of advanced technology is embodied within high-quality capital goods, which are produced by developed economies. Thus, international technology diffusion goes through the channel of trading high-quality capital goods, which establishes a direct causal linkage from trade to growth. The capital import is subject to the balance of payments constraint and must be financed by exports. We develop a formal two-country model, characterize the steady states, and discuss their dynamic features. Our model could shed light on several stylized facts." --
Author: Alberto José Vindas Quesada Publisher: ISBN: Category : Economic development Languages : en Pages : 161
Book Description
This dissertation consists of three essays on modern economic growth and structural transformation, in particular touching on the reallocation of labor across industries, occupations, and employment statuses. The first chapter investigates the quantitative importance of non-employment in the labor market outcomes for the United States. During the last 50 years, production has shifted from goods to services. In terms of occupations, the routine employment share decreased, giving way to increases in manual and abstract ones. These two patterns are related, and lower non-employment had an important role. A labor allocation model where goods, market services, and home services use different tasks as inputs is used for quantitative exercises. These show that non-employment could significantly slow down polarization and structural transformation, and induce significant displacement within the labor force. The second chapter, coauthored with Bart Hobijn and Todd Schoellman, looks at the demographic structure of structural transformation. More than half of labor reallocation during structural transformation is due to new cohorts disproportionately entering growing industries. This suggests substantial costs to labor reallocation. A model of overlapping generations with life-cycle career choice under switching costs and structural transformation is studied. Switching costs accelerate structural transformation, since forward-looking workers enter growing industries in anticipation of future wage growth. Most of the impact of switching costs shows on relative wages. The third chapter establishes that job polarization is a global phenomenon. The analysis of polarization is extended from a group of developed countries to a sample of 119 economies. At all levels of development, employment shares in routine occupations have decreased since the 1980s. This suggests that routine occupations are becoming increasingly obsolete throughout the world, rather than being outsourced to developing countries. A development accounting framework with technical change at the \textit{task} level is proposed. This allows to quantify and extrapolate task-specific productivity levels. Recent technological change is biased against routine occupations and in favor of manual occupations. This implies that in the following decades, world polarization will continue: employment in routine occupations will decrease, and the reallocation will happen mostly from routine to manual occupations, rather than to abstract ones.
Author: Célestin Monga Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0198793847 Category : Economic development Languages : en Pages : 741
Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Structural Transformation addresses the economics of structural transformation around the world. It deals with major themes, which include history and context, critical issues and concepts, methodological foundations, main theoretical approaches, policy issues, some illuminating country experiences of structural transformation, and important debates on the respective roles of the market and the state in that process. The historical record provides a challenge for economists to understand the success of the rising economic powers (some of them initially considered unlikely candidates for prosperity) and the stagnation or decline of others. Five major questions emerge: DT Why has so much divergence occurred among nations of the world since the Industrial Revolution, and particularly during the 20th century? DT Why has the pattern changed recently with the emergence of a few developing economies (e.g. the multi-polar world), and can it be sustained? DT What are the key drivers, strategies, and policies, to foster structural transformation in various different country contexts and in a constantly evolving global economy? DT How could low- and middle-income countries avoid development traps and learn from past experiences whilst exploiting the new opportunities offered by the Fourth Industrial Revolution? DT What is the role of various development stakeholders and other important players in facilitating sustained economic convergence among nations? This book addresses these questions, bringing the rigor, usefulness, and multi-disciplinary scope of the Oxford Handbook series to a critical topic in economics. The Oxford Handbook of Structural Transformation is an essential reference work and a stimulus to new research and creativity across all branches of the social sciences.
Author: Kunal Sen Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 100944994X Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 194
Book Description
One of the key features of modern economic growth is the process of structural transformation, which is the movement of workers from agriculture to manufacturing and services. This study identifies different routes to structural transformation that we see in the developing world. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Author: Jan Fagerberg Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing ISBN: 1788110269 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 431
Book Description
This authoritative and enlightening book focuses on fundamental questions such as what is innovation, who is it relevant for, what are the effects, and what is the role of (innovation) policy in supporting innovation-diffusion? The first two sections present a comprehensive overview of our current knowledge on the phenomenon and analyse how this knowledge (and the scholarly community underpinning it) has evolved towards its present state. The third part explores the role of innovation for growth and development, while section four is concerned with the national innovation system and the role of (innovation) policy in influencing its dynamics and responding to the important challenges facing contemporary societies.
Author: Mayuko Kondo Publisher: ISBN: Category : Electronic dissertations Languages : en Pages : 168
Book Description
Structural transformation and corresponding labor productivity growth are fundamentals of economic development. This dissertation, titled Structural Transformation from A Microeconomic View, explores the path of the structural transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). In the last 20 years in SSA, structural transformation was not always accompanied by overall labor productivity growth. The first essay of this dissertation, titled Education, Profitability, and Household Labor Allocation in Rural Uganda, explores the microeconomic factors that explain non-growing-productivity structural change with a focus on the role of education. I jointly estimate household hourly profit (wage) and labor supply functions. The estimation result is supportive of the hypothesis that the level of education, profitability of an activity, and time allocation to that activity can be not positively correlated while education positively increases total household profit from the activity. To trigger structural transformation, the governments of SSA and donors have allocated a vast amount of resources into agricultural programs for over 20 years. Aggregate agriculture productivity, however, has shown little growth in the last 20 years. Yet the share of employment in agriculture has constantly decreased since 2000. Whether agriculture productivity growth advances the labor shift from the agriculture sector to the non-agriculture sector is still an open question and of great interest for efficient investment in agriculture development and the economic growth of the countries. The second essay, titled Land and Labor Bias of Farm Technology and the Household's Labor Allocation Decisions, explores the effect of land- and labor-augmenting farm technologies on the household's labor decisions. I provide a theoretical model to describe the household responses to land- and labor-augmenting farm technical change. I classify agricultural households into six regimes based on the participation in on- and off-farm labor markets and the constraint of off-farm work opportunities. I derive propositions to examine the behaviors of the households in each regime. In the empirical part of the study, I apply the model to microeconomic data from Tanzania to test the propositions. The estimation results show that for Tanzanian maize farmers, the adoption of land-augmenting technology, that is organic fertilizer, inorganic fertilizer, or irrigation, increases on-farm labor and decreases off-farm labor while the adoption of labor-augmenting technology, including sprayers, pesticides, herbicides, animal traction, or tractors, decreases on-farm labor and increases off-farm labor when the elasticity of substitution between labor and land is sufficiently large. Taken together, these essays shed light on important policy implications for the acceleration of structural transformation in SSA. The estimation result from the first essay suggests that the expansion of the industry in which higher levels of education increase profitability of work would pull laborers from farming into nonfarm activities. Relaxing the labor market constraints of individuals, especially from relatively less educated households, would shift hours of labor allocation from less profitable activities towards more profitable activities. Also, raising household incomes or standard of living would increase the preference of individuals for leisure relative to income, and increase the optimal marginal productivity of labor, and consequently the profitability of labor. The second essay provides evidence that depending on the conditions of a country such as the level of elasticity of substitution between land and labor and the constraints around off-farm work opportunities, labor-augmenting agricultural technologies have a good potential for speeding up the structural transformation.
Author: Domenico Marchetti Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 9780815327226 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 108
Book Description
Three essays on the ways in which business cycles affect productivity review and criticize previous research, propose an dynamic model using gross output data, and provide a decomposition of industrial productivity growth in Polish manufacturing 1992-93 indicating the importance of structural effects. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Author: Zhen Zhu Publisher: ISBN: 9781303219511 Category : Economic development Languages : en Pages : 188
Book Description
This dissertation consists of three chapters exploring the Solow Residual of the Solow growth model. Two central components of the Solow Residual have been studied in my doctoral dissertation. The first is the structural transformation, an internal adjustment process that helps the economy attain the optimal points on its Production Possibility Frontier by reallocating resources from the low-productivity sectors to the high-productivity sectors. The second is the technology diffusion, a positive externality process that pushes forward the economy's Production Possibility Frontier if it adopts the newer technology. The first chapter of my dissertation is devoted to a case study of China's structural transformation. As one of the fastest growing economies in the world, China has observed dramatic reallocation of resources from the agricultural sector to the nonagricultural sector over the last three decades. This chapter proposes a two-sector growth model and identifies three driving forces for China's structural transformation. Most importantly, the migration costs can be shown as a significant barrier to the reallocation process after I calibrate the model with real data. The second and the third chapters of my dissertation are devoted to the study of the technology diffusion. The second chapter is a collaborative effort with Gary Ferrier and Javier Reyes. We approach the cross-country technology diffusion from a novel perspective -- the trade network can be viewed as the conduit of the technology diffusion. The question we ask is whether the trade network structure matters in the technology diffusion process. We consider 24 major technologies over the period from 1962 to 2000 and find that, in most cases, there is strong and robust evidence to suggest that the better-connected countries on the trade network tend to adopt or assimilate newer and more advanced technologies faster. However, the better-connected countries tend to have lower technology intensity if the technology has become obsolete. Finally, the third chapter is a theoretical approach to the technology diffusion. In particular, the technology diffusion across countries can be generalized as a learning process on networks. Based on a stylized learning model, this chapter examines the impact of the network structures on the speed of the diffusion process.
Author: Junmin Liao
Author: Junmin Liao
Author: Zongye Huang
Author: Alberto José Vindas Quesada
Author: Célestin Monga
Author: Luigi L. Pasinetti
Author: Kunal Sen
Author: Jan Fagerberg
Author: Mayuko Kondo
Author: Domenico Marchetti
Author: Zhen Zhu