Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to document the transformation of developing Asia's manufacturing sector during the last three decades. Design/methodology/approach – The paper briefly discusses the transformation during the last 30 years and benchmarks the sector by estimating a...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to document the transformation of developing Asia's manufacturing sector during the last three decades. Design/methodology/approach – The paper briefly discusses the transformation during the last 30 years and benchmarks the sector by estimating a...

We assemble a large database of countries' manufacturing employment and output shares for 1970-2010. We ask whether increased global competition and labor-displacing technological change have made it more difficult for countries to industrialize in employment, and whether there are alternative...

This paper argues that the single most important factor that explains East Asia's development success was its fast structural transformation toward industrialization, manufacturing in particular. Workers moved out of agriculture into manufacturing, and the sector diversified and upgraded its...

This paper argues that the single most important factor that explains East Asia's development success was its fast structural transformation toward industrialization, manufacturing in particular. Workers moved out of agriculture into manufacturing, and the sector diversified and upgraded its...

We use the real wage–profit rate schedule to examine the direction of technical change in India's organized manufacturing sector during 1980–2007. We find that technical change was Marx biased (i.e., declining capital productivity with increasing labor productivity) through the 1980s and...