A Time-Series Test of Patterns of Industrial Growth

Abstract

The growing interest in changes in the level of income over time has brought with it an interest in the changing composition of income over time. The data assembled by Kuznets indicate that there are many similarities between the revealed by intertemporal comparisons, on the one hand, and international comparisons (at one moment of time), on the other. In both cases, systematic shifts in the structure of national income are associated with changes in real per capita income, and the direction of change is the same if one looks at one country at different points of time and at different countries at the same point of time. As a result, it has been natural to assume that the time-series and cross-section are produced by the same forces and that conclusions reached about one type of pattern can be used in discussing the other. It is this assumption that gives Chenery's work on crosssection in the structure of national income relevance for the development of specific countries and leads to the use of the term growth patterns to describe his results. 1