Michael Peters Publications

Structural transformation in most currently developing countries takes the form of a rapid rise in services but limited industrialization. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to structurally estimate productivity growth in service industries that circumvents the notorious difficulties in measuring quality improvements. In our theory, the expansion of the service sector is both a consequence—due to income effects—and a cause—due to productivity growth—of the development process. We estimate the model using Indian household data. We find that productivity growth in nontradable consumer services such as retail, restaurants, or residential real estate was an important driver of structural transformation and rising living standards between 1987 and 2011. However, the welfare gains were heavily skewed toward high-income urban dwellers.

Virtually all theories of economic growth predict a positive relationship between population size and productivity. In this paper, I study a particular historical episode to provide direct evidence for the empirical relevance of such scale effects. In the af- termath of the Second World War, 8 million ethnic Germans were expelled from their domiciles in Eastern Europe and transferred to West Germany. This inflow increased the German population by almost 20%. Using variation across counties, I show that the settlement of refugees had large and persistent effects on the size of the local popula- tion, manufacturing employment, and income per capita. These findings are quantita- tively consistent with an idea-based model of spatial growth if population mobility is subject to frictions and productivity spillovers occur locally. The estimated model im- plies that the refugee settlement increased aggregate income per capita by about 12% after 25 years and triggered a process of industrialization in rural areas.