Purpose – This paper aims to investigate the relationship between structural change and economic growth for a panel of four developing countries, namely, Malaysia, Nigeria, Turkey and Indonesia over 1960-2010. Design/methodology/approach – The study extent the growth equation by incorporating degree of openness, labour and investment and construct structural change indices – modified Lilien index and the norm of absolute values. It utilizes the recently developed panel cointegration techniques to test and estimate the long-run equilibrium of the growth equation. Findings – The results confirm that structural change and economic growth are cointegrated at the panel level, indicating the presence of long-run equilibrium relationship. However, the impact of structural change on economic growth seems to be small and evolve slowly. Originality/value – The findings indicate the need for policymakers to identify the binding constraints that impede growth and the importance of institutionalize policy to encourage investment in productive sectors.

Poverty has been a daunting global issue since the Industrial Revolution. Despite the economic successes achieved in the world, efforts to reduce poverty became prostrating in many countries. Although economists have, for long, recognized the significant role of structural transformation in economic growth and development of any economy, studies linking it with poverty and inequality are quite scanty. This paper uses ARDL bound testing technique to investigate the interrelationship among structural transformation, growth, inequality and poverty using Nigerian data. The results show that despite very low rate of structural transformation in Nigeria, there exists long-run relationship among the variables in the study. The insignificance of the structural transformation variable in the model indicates that the structural transformation is very slow in the country. The transformation that started in Nigeria in the early 1960s was disrupted by the emergence of oil as the mainstay of the economy leading to neglect of the other real sectors by the government. The failure of making best use of revenues from oil to support structural transformation of the economy led to the 'paradox of plenty', a rich country with lots of poor people.

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