The role of trade in structural transformation
By Marc Teignier. 2010
184 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Low agriculture productivity is considered a key obstacle to economic development for many countries. International trade in agricultural goods can help overcome this barrier and facilitate structural transformation because it allows countries to import part of their food needs. This article quantifies the role of trade in this context through the examples of South Korea during the last 50 years and Great Britain in the 19th century. To do the analysis, I calibrate and simulate a two-sector, neoclassical growth model to match the data and perform the policy experiments. I find that agricultural imports played a crucial role in the early transformation of Great Britain, while, in South Korea, trade also had a positive impact on its structural transformation but it could have played a much larger role if the country had not introduced agricultural protection policies.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/402eb1c921fb803e3d7185411ce56c5d12b4aa6c
How researchers see this paper
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In Economics and Econometrics
- David Lagakos
- Michael E. Waugh
- Tomasz ëwiƒcki
- Bingjing Li
- Sebastián Sotelo
- D. Gollin
- Diego Restuccia
- Costas Arkolakis
Citations in the corpus
- Determinants of Structural Change (2013, background): “While Uy et al. (2013) find higher elasticities of substitution based on Korean data, they use a different commodity space. In terms of terminology of Herrendorf et al. (2013b), I use a consumption value added approach while Uy et al. (2013) use a consumption final expenditure approach.34 Herrendorf”
- Selection, Agriculture, and Cross-Country Productivity Differences (2013, background): “See also Gollin, Lagakos, and Waugh (2011) for more on the open-economy implications of selection in multi-sector models, or Tombe (2011) and Teignier (2012) for more on how the lack of agriculture imports by countries with unproductive agriculture sectors can impede growth and structural change.”