Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/267001 
Year of Publication: 
2022
Series/Report no.: 
Working Paper No. 2022-11
Publisher: 
University of Massachusetts, Department of Economics, Amherst, MA
Abstract: 
We construct a new global commodity-level export dataset to analyze the persistence of export patterns as proxies of productive capabilities across the first and the current waves of globalization. We find that productive capabilities are path-dependent and historical capabilities are powerful predictors of countries' incomes today. This is robust to controlling for persistence in geography, institutions, and colonial status, and confirmed by instrumenting past capabilities with asymmetric reductions in travel times following the switch from sailing to steamboats. We also show that the "great specialization" in primary goods and manufacturing goods exporters coincided with a great polarization in global diversification levels.
Subjects: 
persistence
globalization
productive capabilities
development
global export patterns
JEL: 
O33
O47
F02
F14
F6
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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