ETD

• agent-based model
• income distribution
• structural change

As economic development is a process marked by continuous structural transformation, a central puzzle concerns how economic systems can achieve stable long-run macroeconomic outcomes. This thesis addresses this issue from two complementary perspectives. First, it investigates the role of industrial composition in shaping macroeconomic configurations, while also exploring the extent to which the characteristics of the productive structure mutually interact. Second, it examines how income distribution—mediated by labor market institutions— affects aggregate outcomes by influencing both consumption patterns and occupational structure. These questions are addressed within a complexity framework, using the multi-sector K+S model as a data-generating process. The model incorporates: (i) the arrival of disruptive innovations through the introduction of new technological paradigms; (ii) the endogenous emergence and decline of industries characterized by distinct product-level features; and (iii) consumption rules modelled through a hierarchical satisfaction of needs. The analysis focuses on specialization patterns, industrial complexity and maturity as key industry-level variables, and studies income distribution by simulating a regime transition from rigid to flexible industrial relations.

The results show that the properties of the output structure are far from random: industry-level characteristics co-evolve and mutually influence one another, giving rise to a chain of feedbacks between them. These industry-level variables in turn influence the macroeconomic profile of the simulated economy. In particular, greater specialization increases exposure to short- and medium-term fluctuations, leading to a more unstable macroeconomic configuration. By contrast, industrial complexity acts as a stabilizing force by mediating the tension between labor-saving process innovation and labor-absorbing product innovation. Further, industrial maturity is found to be responsible for a fragile balance between a stabilizing effect—by reducing medium-term fluctuations associated with the turbulence of “creative destruction”— and the crystallization of the system which hampers its evolutionary dynamics and generates bottlenecks for the continuation of long-run development. Finally, our work illustrates that an ordinate pattern of macroeconomic development crucially rests on the produced distribution of resources, which has been found to interact with the structural dynamics of the system. Specifically, we document that income inequalities endogenously map into consumption inequalities, with final demand that is progressively driven by the luxury consumption expressed by the highest echelons of the income distribution. However, this process entails significant leakages in effective demand, eventually leading to unbalanced structural change in the occupational structure and the deterioration of the quality of the output structure of the flexible scenario.