Globalization and Structural Change

Speech by U.S. Secretary of Labor, Elaine L. Chao, for the G-8 Labor and Employment Ministers Conference in Germany addressing successes, opportunities, and challenges facing the 21st century workforce

日本の産業構造の変化について

1 はじめに 2 日本の海外直接投資　3 「産業の空洞化」とその要因　4 日本の製造業における比較優位　5 むすびにかえ

Structural change under New Labour

The paper examines specific features of structural change in the UK since 1997, contrasting the decline in industrial jobs with the rise in a variety of service jobs. It examines the proximate causes of structural change, in particular whether the chronically slow growth of manufacturing output in the 1980s has persisted. The implications of this structural change are considered, particularly the effects on the balance of payments and regional employment patterns. The paper suggests that the main impact of government policies on regional employment may have been through the direct and multiplier effects of public expenditure

Supply Side Structural Change

The interest rate and the rate of economic growth are often regarded as roughly constant as economies grow. Moreover, the agricultural sector and rural population typically shrink. We show that an otherwise standard growth model that includes a backward and an advanced sector can account for these regularities. The mechanism works as follows: as the economy accumulates capital, labor flows from the backward sector to the advanced one. This migration prevents the usual diminishing marginal returns of capital. As a result, the interest rate and the growth rate of the economy remain constant during the transition to the steady state. The model predicts that developed countries must experience a sudden slowdown in their growth rates once the backward sector fully disappears. Productivity, as measured by the Solow residuals, also must slow down. Cross-country evidence supports these predictions of the modelGrowth, Structural Change, Urbanization, Choice of Techniques, Productivity Slowdown

Supply Side Structural Change

Growing economies often exhibit constant growth rates, constant interest rates, and an increasing urban share of their population. We show that the equilibrium path triggered by a capital-biased technological revolution can account for these regularities. This type of technological change can generate an aggregate production function that displays linear segments. As the economy moves along those segments, the interest rate and the growth rate are constant, and labor is gradually reallocated from the old (rural) techniques to the new (urban) techniques. The model predicts that developed countries must experience a sudden slowdown in their growth rates once their structural change is completed. Productivity, as measured by the Solow residuals, also displays a growth slowdown. Cross-country evidence supports these predictions of the model.

Conformism and Structural Change

We study structural change in a simple, two-sector endogenous growth model and show that the presence of commodity-specific consumption externalities can be a source of structural change. When the degrees of consumption externalities are different between different goods, the two sectors grow at different rates, whereas the aggregate economy exhibits balanced growth in the sense that capital stock and expenditure grow at the same constant rate. Under the more restrictive condition such that the degrees of consumption externalities are the same, structural change does not occur. We also show that the dependence of the benchmark consumption levels on the past consumption is crucial for the divergent patterns of structural change across countries.

Aging and Structural Change

Many studies analyzed in depth how aging affects aggregate economic performance. But analyses of these effects on the employment structure are scarce and they do not consider that consumption patterns, the supply of goods and services, and also sectoral labor productivity are all likely to adjust to aging and will change. Hence, regression analysis of sectoral employment shares is proposed that controls for aging. For a large panel of countries and a long time period it is found that aging indeed affects relative employment of most sectors statistically highly significant either positive or negative. We also conclude that aging tends to accelerate ongoing structural change. This enables to derive specific policy implications. The approach could thus become a new method in forecasting employment and other effects of aging.Aging, structural change, panel regressions

Structural Change in (Economic) Time Series

Methods for detecting structural changes, or change points, in time series data are widely used in many fields of science and engineering. This chapter sketches some basic methods for the analysis of structural changes in time series data. The exposition is confined to retrospective methods for univariate time series. Several recent methods for dating structural changes are compared using a time series of oil prices spanning more than 60 years. The methods broadly agree for the first part of the series up to the mid-1980s, for which changes are associated with major historical events, but provide somewhat different solutions thereafter, reflecting a gradual increase in oil prices that is not well described by a step function. As a further illustration, 1990s data on the volatility of the Hang Seng stock market index are reanalyzed.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure

OCCUPATIONAL CHOICE AND STRUCTURAL CHANGE

The connection between average sectoral income, occupational choice and structural change has so far only been described vaguely for sectors dominated by small enterprises. Taking agriculture as an example, we first develop a theoretical model in which we explain the decision to take over a farm with the average agricultural household income in the past years and the number of farms with the patterns of occupational choice. We then estimate a regression in which we explain occupational choices by the sectoral income situation and rate of farm decline by earlier occupational choices. The results demonstrate that a good income situation increases the number of occupational choices in favour for farming, and that occupational choices for farming in turn slow down the decline in farm numbers.Occupational choices, Structural change, Agricultural income, Research paper, Labor and Human Capital,