In this article we investigate the empirical relationship between overall specialization and per capita income. The metric we use to measure overall specialization is the median of the sectoral distribution of the Balassa Index of Revealed Comparative Advantages applied to four-digit (SITC rev.2) sectoral export manufactured data for 39 countries over the period 1985 to 2001. Once we take into account countries' specificities using fixed effects GAM, the results of the semiparametric analysis indicate that sectoral diversification of manufactured exports increases monotonically with development, and thus the reconcentration observed at high levels of income in the recent literature may not be linked to trade-induced specialization.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Christopher F. Baum).
Related research
Keywords:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)