The Bangladesh economy has undergone significant structural changes over the last four decades. The share of agriculture in GDP has declined, while the significance of industry and service sectors has increased. These structural changes have been associated with persistent challenges such as...

Growth in South Asia has not resulted in structural transformation and increase of productive capacities. This paper presents a methodology to identify the opportunities for countries in South Asia to build their productive capacities and promote structural transformation through the emulation...

Africa is a case of structural change without industrialization and without diversification. Agriculture's decline was matched by an increase in services and non-manufacturing industry, with manufacturing remaining low and stagnant throughout the post-colonial period. To what extent do these...

In this paper we look at the economic development of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in the context of structural transformation. We use Hidalgo et al.’s (2007) concept of product space to show the evolution of the region’s productive structure, and discuss the opportunities for growth and...

This paper analyzes the degree of structural transformation in the Kyrgyz Republic’s economy by applying the new approach developed by Hausmann and Klinger (2007) and Hidalgo et al. (2007). We focus on the level of sophistication of the country’s exports, and discuss policy options to...

In the pursuit of structural transformation and inclusive growth, this paper identifies industries in Tanzania which can accumulate new productive knowledge and diversify the economy. The analysis has two main components. First, a Product Space analysis identifies niches primarily within the...

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 derive a measure of the degree of inefficiency of the production structure of an economy by casting its optimal sectoral composition as the outcome of a portfolio allocation problem, in the spirit of Koren and Tenreyro (2004). We use the framework to construct measures of inefficiency using...

Can temporary wartime mobilization change the long-run development trajectory of an economy? We study how mobilization for World War II in colonial India influenced its subsequent development. From 1939 to 1945, the British colonial government purchased massive amounts of war materiel within...