Summary: | The paper presents a North-South trade model that discusses how changes in the technology gap affect specialization and growth in the Southern economy. The contribution of the paper is to propose a new specification for the influence of the technology gap on the pattern of specialization. It also analyzes the implications of the dynamics of the technology gap for the process of international convergence and divergence, within the context of a Ricardian trade model with a continuum of goods. Subsequently, the predictions of the model are tested through a panel analysis of the determinants of economic growth in the nineties. With this objective, new proxies recently proposed by the literature for the technological variable (the Schumpeterian dimension of the model) and for the dynamism of the pattern of specialization (the Keynesian dimension) were included in the empirical work.
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