Economic takeoffs in a dynamic process of globalization

The paper develops a dynamic general-equilibrium framework to illustrate that trade liberalization may speed up the process of globalization and industrialization by enabling a small open economy to reallocate production factors to modern export sectors where increasing returns to experience are present. The authors emphasize the role of knowledge in service activities related to the export of modern sector goods, which has the form of a public good that can be utilized in exporting of other modern sector goods. As a consequence of this knowledge accumulation, the economy begins to take off and exhibits more rapid rates of wage and output growth. The accumulation of knowledge also shifts comparative advantage in the modern sector to more service-intensive goods, thus leading to a natural evolution of comparative advantage. These results lend theoretical support to the different development experiences in the 1960s between East Asia and Latin America.