Structural Transformation in the 20th Century: A New Database on Agricultural Employment Around the World

Many empirical questions about economic growth and development are left open due to the lack of long time series of reliable GDP estimates. The share of the labor force employed in agriculture can fill this gap. Agricultural employment shares are highly correlated with GDP per capita, less prone to measurement errors, and data are available for longer periods than existing GDP estimates. This paper describes a new database on agricultural employment covering 169 countries for the period 1900-2010. Some of the many potential uses of the data are discussed.