The Structural Transformation of Transition Economies (Hybrid event)

21  February 2023    3:00 pm CET

Calumn Hamilton, Groningen Growth and Development Centre

In cooperation with:
  

Venue

Onsite: wiiw, Rahlgasse 3, 1060 Vienna

Description

This presentation is based on a paper co-authored with Gaaitzen de Vries.

Abstract:
This paper documents inter-industry structural change in the former-Soviet transition economies for the three decades since the breakup of the Soviet Union and compares with the experience of other developing regions. It examines empirically the contribution of such structural change to overall labour productivity growth. It presents a new dataset - the Economic Transformation Database of Transition Economies [ETD-TE] - of annual sectoral employment and value added data for fourteen former-Soviet Republics across the period 1990-2019. This dataset is built from scratch from primary and archive sources and is designed as a 'bolt-on attachment' for the GGDC/UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database. Stylized facts and shift-share decomposition analysis reveal that workers reallocated to less productive activities in the transition economies, but that this effect is concentrated in the first decade of transition.  This finding is in contrast to other major world developing regions such as Africa, Latin America, and Developing Asia, which demonstrated a non-negative structural change contribution to labour productivity over the same time period  Sub-regional analysis shows exceptions to the general trend in the case of the Baltic republics, which experienced growth-enhancing structural change throughout, and the Core countries of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, which reverted to growth-reducing structural change in the most recent decade.

The presentation, when available, will be posted online after the event.

Registration link for onsite participation:
https://wiiw.ac.at/the-structural-transformation-of-transition-economies-er-608.html

Registration link for online participation:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_JLcxVR6aTMe1egFwXow0XA

For participating in discussion at the Q&A session better, we highly recommend on-site participation.

Calumn Hamilton

Calumn Hamilton is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen and an affiliate of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre. His research focuses on development economics at the macroeconomic level, including areas such as structural change, aid effectiveness, the interaction of gender and development, and financial inclusion. Calumn is also involved in the construction and maintenance of various publicly available large-scale macroeconomic databases. Calumn’s first book was co-authored with Charles Adjasi and Robert Lensink and was published by Edward Elgar in summer 2022.

Related literature:

Keywords: Structural change, transition economies, labour productivity growth, industrialization, former-Soviet republics.

JEL classification: C80, N10, O10, P24

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