Semiparametric Analysis of the Specialization-Income Relationship

In this paper we investigate the empirical relationship between overall specialization and per capita income. The metric we use to measure overall specialization is the median of the sectoral distribution of the Balassa index of Revealed Comparative Advantages applied to 4-digit (SITC rev.2) sectoral export manufactured data for 39 countries over the period 1985-2001. The result of the semiparametric analysis is that a negative relationship between this metric and per capita income emerges