Manufacturing as the Key Engine of Economic Growth for Middle-Income Economies

This paper revisits the role of the manufacturing sector during the middle-income stage. By exploiting a large dataset that covers internationally comparable sectoral information, we prove that the manufacturing sector is imbued with three important characteristics. First, for middle-income economies, manufacturing pulls along services, instead of the other way around. A decline in the manufacturing sector growth rate will negatively affect the growth rate of the services sector, in both the short-run and long-run meanings.

Source: Publications from the Asian Development Bank (ADB.org)