Replication Package for "Europe Falling Behind: Structural Transformation and Labor Productivity Growth Differences Between Europe and the U.S."

This dataset contains the complete replication package for Buiatti, Duarte, and Sáenz (2026), "Europe Falling Behind: Structural Transformation and Labor Productivity Growth Differences Between Europe and the U.S.", Journal of International Economics.

The paper develops a multi-sector structural transformation model to study the divergence in labor productivity growth between Europe and the United States since the mid-1990s, and quantifies the roles of sectoral productivity growth and labor reallocation across sectors through counterfactual experiments under three model variants (closed economy, open economy with exogenous trade, and open economy with endogenous trade).

The package is self-contained: running `python code/master.py` reproduces every figure and table in the paper and its online appendix end-to-end in approximately 7-12 minutes on modern Apple Silicon (Python 3.11 with pandas 2.x, or Python 3.8 with pandas 1.5). All 19 pipeline steps are orchestrated from master.py, and README.pdf provides a per-figure and per-table replication map.

Contents. code/ — all Python scripts (model calibration, European tests, closed-economy and trade counterfactuals, figure and table generators, and utility modules for shift-share decomposition and LP-TFP correlation analysis); data/ — analysis-ready panels (EU KLEMS 2023, Penn World Table 10.0, OECD GDP per hour, OECD ICIO trade panels) and the raw source files under data/raw_data/ (including the ~180 MB EU KLEMS Growth Accounts file for the Table 4 TFP correlation analysis); requirements.txt — Python dependencies; README.md / README.pdf — setup and replication instructions; LICENSE — MIT.

Requirements. Python 3.8 or newer with the packages in requirements.txt; a LaTeX installation (MacTeX, TeX Live, or MiKTeX) for matplotlib's text rendering.

Source and versioning. This dataset mirrors the v1.0 tagged release of the GitHub repository https://github.com/jbduarte/europe-falling-behind-replication.