The agents of structural change: Insights from 30 years of survey data across the globe
Type
fundamental research project
End Date
August 31, 2025
Keywords
Macroeconomics
Growth
Development
Gender
Firms
Description
Economic development is accompanied by a steady decline in agricultural employment. Understanding the drivers of structural change out of agriculture along the development path is critical to understanding income differences across the world. A large body of research on structural change has analyzed structural change at the aggregate level. Only exceptionally has it distinguished how different population groups have experienced it differentially or have, through their characteristics, contributed to structural change. Existing work of this type has mostly focussed on developed economies.
This proposal outlines a comprehensive research program that delves deeper and studies structural change out of agriculture at a more granular level. Our objective is to understand individual and household choices of time allocation and the allocation of labor supply to sectors, which are the fundamental determinants of an economy’s sectoral structure. To do so, we leverage the wealth of household, labor force, and time use surveys that have been collected across the world over the past three decades. Expanding on our earlier work, we propose to harmonize these datasets to create two unique and novel large-scale micro-datasets with broad coverage of countries across the development spectrum, the Harmonised World Labor Force Survey (HWLFS) and the Harmonised World Time Use Survey (HWTUS). We then analyze these datasets through the lens of macroeconomic theory to guide policy.
This proposal outlines a comprehensive research program that delves deeper and studies structural change out of agriculture at a more granular level. Our objective is to understand individual and household choices of time allocation and the allocation of labor supply to sectors, which are the fundamental determinants of an economy’s sectoral structure. To do so, we leverage the wealth of household, labor force, and time use surveys that have been collected across the world over the past three decades. Expanding on our earlier work, we propose to harmonize these datasets to create two unique and novel large-scale micro-datasets with broad coverage of countries across the development spectrum, the Harmonised World Labor Force Survey (HWLFS) and the Harmonised World Time Use Survey (HWTUS). We then analyze these datasets through the lens of macroeconomic theory to guide policy.
Leader contributor(s)
Charles Gottlieb
Member contributor(s)
Markus Poschke
Funder
Range
HSG + other universities
Division(s)