Data and Code for Unconditional Convergence in Manufacturing: A Reassessment

The movement of labor out of the agricultural sector is a central feature of the development process. A long-held belief is that successful development requires that much of the labor released from agriculture be allocated to manufacturing rather than services. Rodrik's (2013) finding of unconditional convergence for manufacturing productivity using data from UNIDO provided empirical support for this view. We argue that the UNIDO data are ill-suited to study cross-country productivity dynamics. We use recently released data from the GGDC that was developed especially to study cross-country sectoral productivity dynamics to revisit this issue. We find no evidence of unconditional convergence in manufacturing productivity over the period 1990-2018.