The Relevance of Productive Experience in the Process of Economic Growth: an Empirical Study

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyse the effects of productive experience in the process of economic growth. To do this, we estimate an augmented version of the Solow growth model where we include a measure called centrality among the set of usual explanatory variables. This variable summarizes the overall usefulness of a country’s productive experience and it is computed as in Freitas and Salvado (2009), following Hausmann and Klinger (2007). In general, we failed to find a robust relationship between centrality and subsequent growth. This result casts doubts on the usefulness of the centrality measure in the prediction of economic growth.Economic Growth, Productive Experience, Structural Transformation.