Labor Economics Commons^™

Structural Change And Productivity Growth In Developing Countries, Ahmed Salim Nuhu

Masters Theses

The dual-economy model predicts that holding productivity constant, labor reallocation from less to more productive sectors, also known as 'structural change' results in improvement in economy-wide productivity. The objective of this thesis is to test the empirical predictions of this model using sectoral-level data from twenty-eight developing countries. Using the shift-share growth decomposition approach, we find regional growth-enhancing effects of structural change in Asia, Latin America and North Africa from, 1980 to 2000 and growth-reducing effects in Sub-Saharan Africa over the same period. However, as intersectoral productivity gaps disappeared after 2000, technological progress led the growth process in much of …