Surveying structural change: Seminal contributions and a bibliometric account

Structural change analysis has an important tradition in economic theory. However, up to the present date, no attempt had been made to provide an overall survey on the matter. This paper aims to fill this gap. To this end, bibliometric methods were applied, combining 9703 citations from the area's ‘seed journal’ with a review of 910 abstracts of all theoretical and empirical articles on structural change that were published over the past 40 years in the journals indexed in the Econlit. We testify the recent rise of interest in structural change where technological issues gained increasing relevance. The 1990s witnessed a spurt in formal work, but more recently such trend was not confirmed; on the contrary, there has been a strong impetus towards empirically led work. Our analysis further reveals that most contributions put great emphasis on technology-driven growth and lack an appropriate treatment of the demand side.