Structural change and industrial transformation in Brazil, Chile and Uruguay

Abstract

Since the second half of the twentieth century, structuralism and other theoretical perspectives have emphasized the decisive role of structural change in order to explain the relative performance of Latin American economies. Recent works have also contributed to the debate over why some regions were able to develop and others were not, through explaining the structural change. The main aim of this research is to study whether structural transformation in manufacturing occurred using a shift-share analysis. The results show that Brazil is one of the three Latin American countries studied which managed to reduce its structural heterogeneity during the industrialization period, measured by the shift-share analysis.