Structural change in OECD comparative advantage

In the post-war period, the goods composition of trade in Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries has changed considerably. We analyze the evolution of comparative advantage using a detailed trade data set and a new analytical tool: the Harmonic Mass index (HM index), which enables us to identify periods of structural change. We then discuss which forces may be responsible for the main structural changes, which primarily took place in many OECD countries in the mid 1980s. The advantage of the HM analysis is that it indicates when structural breaks occur in history.