Empirical Evidence on the Geometrical Properties of Structural Change Trajectories

Abstract

We study the long-run labor reallocation dynamics in the three-sector framework relating to agriculture, manufacturing, and services. In particular, we depict the labor reallocation data provided by Maddison (1995) and WorldBank on standard simplexes, study the geometrical properties of the implied vector field, and derive the geometrical properties of stylized labor reallocation trajectories. Moreover, we discuss how these properties can be explained by the standard structural change literature and used for structural change analysis and prediction.