Structural Change and Economic Dynamics

Convergence clubs and spatial structural change in the European Union

Wednesday, Aug 16, 2023 by Eleonora Cutrini and Carlos Mendez Structural Change and Economic Dynamics

This article studies regional income convergence and its conditioning factors in 267 subnational regions of the European Union during the 2003–2016 period. Building on previous research that documents the formation of multiple convergence clubs in per-capita income, we study the role of structural change and spatial dependence as key conditioning factors of the club convergence process. Our results are threefold. First, we document that the spatial distribution of the convergence clubs shows a strong degree of spatial dependence.

Sectoral productivity convergence, input-output structure and network communities in Japan

Wednesday, Dec 15, 2021 by Alvaro Dominguez, Felipe Santos and Carlos Mendez Structural Change and Economic Dynamics

We study sectoral productivity convergence through the input-output structure of the economy and its network representation. In particular, we study 106 production sectors in Japan over the 2003-2012 period and identify highly interconnected sectors using community detection algorithms. We next characterize the dynamics of these communities by evaluating the evolution of productivity dispersion using parametric and nonparametric frameworks of sectoral productivity convergence. We find two dominant communities: The central members of community 1 are mostly service-related industries, while the central members of community 2 are mostly high-tech manufacturing industries.