Sectoral Development Multipliers
Seminarios Semanales
Thursday, July 17, 2025
Sectoral Development Multipliers
Nicholas Trachter
Speaker: Nicholas Trachter
Co-authors: Francisco Buera
Affiliation: Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond
Date and time: Wednesday, July 23, 2025 14:00 (Santiago, GMT-04:00)
Location:
- Auditorio at the Central Bank of Chile, Morandé 115, second floor.
- Online meeting
Registration: seminarios@bcentral.cl
Abstract: How should industrial policies be directed to reduce distortions and foster economic development? We study this question in a multi-sector model with technology adoption, where the production of goods and modern technologies features rich network structures. We provide simple formulas for the sectoral policy multipliers, and provide insights regarding the power of alternative policy instruments. We devise a simple procedure to estimate the model parameters and the distribution of technologies across sectors, which we apply to Indian data. We find that technology adoption greatly amplifies the multipliers’ magnitudes, and it changes the ranking of priority sectors for industrial policy. Further, we find that adoption subsidies are the most cost-effective instrument for promoting economic development.