Discovery and development

Bailey Klinger

"Klinger and Lederman use disaggregated export data to explore the relationship between economic discovery and economic development. They find that discoveries, or episodes, when countries begin exporting a new product are not limited to so-called 'dynamic' industries. Rather, they also occur in traditional sectors such as agriculture. In addition, the data suggest discovery is a component of the stages of productive diversification that occur with development, following a consistent pattern--discovery activity peaks at the lower-middle income level and then declines. Based on this pattern, the authors show that discovery in the 1990s occurred with a higher than expected frequency in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and lower than expected frequency in Sub-Saharan Africa. Discovery is not found to be a product of structural transformation based on changing factor endowments...