Growing Like India: The Unequal Effects of Service-Led Growth

This project stems from early discussions with Philippe Aghion and Robin Burgess. A previous version was circulated under the title: Service-Led or Service-Biased Growth? Equilibrium Development Accounting across Indian Districts. We are grateful to Klaus Desmet and Sebastian Sotelo for their thoughtful discussions at the NBER SI and the ASSA. We thank Daron Acemoglu, Manuel Amador, Marios Angeletos, Treb Allen, David Atkin, Johannes Boehm, Timo Boppart, Fabian Eckert, Reto Foellmi, Penny Goldberg, Doug Gollin, Cormac O’Dea, Gordon Hanson, Peter Klenow, Samuel Kortum, Ramon Marimon, Marc Melitz, Giuseppe Moscarini, Andreas Müller, Juan Pablo Nicolini, Rachel Ngai, Ezra Oberfield, Richard Rogerson, María Sáez Martí, Ludwig Straub, Todd Schoellman, Kjetil Storesletten, Aleh Tsyvinski, Danyang Xie, and seminar participants at the ASSA Meeting 2021, the Cowles Macro Conference, the Minneapolis FED, CREi, Dartmouth, Harvard University, HEC Lausanne, IIES, Johns Hopkins SAIS, the NBER Summer Institute, New York University, MIT, Penn State, Peking University, RIDGE, STEG, SED, the Universitá di Bologna, the Universitá della Svizzera Italiana, the University of Sankt Gallen, the Workshop on Structural Transformation and Macroeconomic Dynamics, the World Bank, and Yale University. We thank Sarah Moon, Shengqi Ni, Pariroo Rattan, Haonan Ye, Dalton Zhang, and Huihuang Zhu for excellent research assistance. Michael Peters and Fabrizio Zilibotti thank the “Minnesota Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute” for its generous hospitality. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• March 9, 2021
• July 13, 2022