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Abstract:
Shared socio-economic pathway (SSP) scenarios represent a consistent set of socioeconomic assumptions and a major input of Integrated Assessment Models on climate change. This study added a driver that is missing so far in the SSP framework
- the evolution of the sectoral structure of economies. A newly constructed set of
structural change scenarios is presented. These structural change scenarios represent a well-known characteristic that accompanies the process of economic growth
and development - the reallocation of economic activity between the three major
sectors agriculture, manufacturing and services. While we construct scenarios for
the sectoral shares of labor, value-added and energy based on historical data and an
econometric approach, which comes with some limitation, these scenarios are linked
to the SSP GDP scenarios and hence implicitly capture properties of the narratives
underlying them. We find that the pattern and speed of structural change differ
under different SSPs. Moreover, while the scenarios for developing countries reproduce structural change patterns (e.g., hump-shape of manufacturing labor share),
observed for developed countries in the past, the projected transformation, in particular the reduction of labor shares in the agricultural sector, represents a tremendous
challenge.
