Essays on Structural Transformation, Trade, and Economic Growth

Download or read book Essays on Structural Transformation, Trade, and Economic Growth written by Zongye Huang and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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." --