Unconditional Convergence
Dani Rodrik · National Bureau of Economic Research · 2011
Unlike economies as a whole, manufacturing industries exhibit unconditional convergence in labor productivity.The paper documents this finding for 4-digit manufacturing sectors for a large group of developed and developing countries over the period since 1990.The coefficient of unconditional convergence is estimated quite precisely and is large, at 3.0-5.6percent per year depending on the estimation horizon.The result is robust to a large number of specification tests, and statistically highly significant.Because of data coverage, these findings should be as viewed as applying to the organized, formal parts of manufacturing.