Cycles Growth And Structural Change

This volume gathers together key new contributions on the subject of the relationship, both empirical and theoretical, between economic oscillations, growth and structural change. Employing a sophisticated level of mathematical modelling, the collection contains articles from, amongst others, William Baumol, Katsuhito Iwai and William Brock.

This study provides a comprehensive overview of Korea’s macroeconomic growth and structural change since World War II, and traces some of the roots of development to the colonial period. The authors explore in detail colonial development, changing national income patterns, relative price shifts, sources of aggregate growth, and sources of sectoral structural change, comparing them with other countries.

This volume gathers together key new contributions on the subject of the relationship, both empirical and theoretical, between economic oscillations, growth and structural change. Employing a sophisticated level of mathematical modelling, the collection contains articles from, amongst others, William Baumol, Katsuhito Iwai and William Brock.

Traditionally, economic growth and business cycles have been treated independently. However, the dependence of GDP levels on its history of shocks, what economists refer to as “hysteresis,” argues for unifying the analysis of growth and cycles. In this paper, we review the recent empirical and theoretical literature that motivate this paradigm shift. The renewed interest in hysteresis has been sparked by the persistence of the Global Financial Crisis and fears of a slow recovery from the Covid-19 crisis. The findings of the recent literature have far-reaching conceptual and policy implications. In recessions, monetary and fiscal policies need to be more active to avoid the permanent scars of a downturn. And in good times, running a high-pressure economy could have permanent positive effects.

We document that the nature of business cycles evolves over the process of development and structural change. In countries with large declining agricultural sectors, aggregate employment is uncorrelated with GDP. During booms, employment in agriculture declines while labor productivity increases in agriculture more than in other sectors. We construct a unified theory of business cycles and structural change consistent with the stylized facts. The focal point of the theory is the simultaneous decline and modernization of agriculture. As capital accumulates, agriculture becomes increasingly capital intensive as modern agriculture crowds out traditional agriculture. Structural change accelerates in booms and slows down in recessions. We estimate the model and show that it accounts well for both the structural transformation and the business cycle fluctuations of China.

Development policy is concerned with long-term changes in production, investment, trade, employment, and income distribution. This book developes a set of techniques for analyzing these structural changes and applies them to some of the major problems of developing countries.