The Effects of Economic Structural Transformation on Employment

Structural transformation concept emphasized by countless numbers of policy makers and scholars. Structural transformation affects not only countries' income levels but also a number of their economic parameters. Employment is one of the most significant of these parameters because the success of structural transformation is measured by the contributions of agriculture, manufacturing, and the service sector to growth and employment. In this chapter, the changing effects of economic complexity (as a major indicator of structural transformation) on employment, and the visual representation of this complexity, which is called product space, are studied using samples from South Korea and Japan. As a result of research, it is found out that increased complexity of a country's economy (increased intensity of the product space center) will lead to a decrease in the employment in agriculture and manufacturing, an increase in the employment in the services sector.