Structural Change and Productivity Growth

The relative expansion of the service sector in employment and nominal value added (tertiarisation) with income per capita is one of the most salient aspects of structural change and economic development. For most of the developed world, this expansion has also brought about a relative decline of the manufacturing sector (deindustrialisation) since the end of the 1960s or the beginning of the 1970s. Despite the significance of these processes, the empirical literature has not been able to provide to date a satisfactory assessment about their impact on productivity growth. Since in these studies structural change is normally taken as exogenous and productivity growth at the industry level is not endogenised with respect to structural change, the acknowledgement of the relationship between tertiarisation/deindustrialisation and productivity growth is compromised. In this doctoral thesis I aim to provide a better assessment of the impact of structural change on productivity growth by analising this relationship according to different frameworks..