Whether Kaldor’s three growth laws still operate in commodity-dependent middle-income economies—and through what transmission mechanism—is an open empirical question after three decades of trade liberalisation, financial opening, and the 2002–2014 commodity super-cycle. This paper provides the first bloc-level panel test of the three laws for the Andean Community of Nations (ACN—Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru) over 1993–2019, combining static feasible generalised regressions with dynamic Arellano–Bond difference-GMM and long-run multipliers. The predictions are as follows: manufacturing growth is positively associated with aggregate output (long-run multiplier 0.91), the Verdoorn coefficient is positive and significant at 0.42, and labour reallocation from non-manufacturing activities is associated with rising aggregate productivity over the time. The headline finding, however, is a decomposition failure: the Verdoorn and employment elasticities coefficients sum up to 0.35 rather than 1 as required by the accounting identity, leaving a residual of 0.65. We term this “jobless manufacturing growth” (capital-deepening). This suggests that the Kaldorian regime in the ACN has neither collapsed nor remained intact, but has mutated into a capital-intensive, labour-saving form consistent with Dutch-disease. Thus, industrial policy alone would deepen the jobless pattern: structural transformation in these economies requires pairing subsidy plans with the macroeconomic management of commodity-dependent exchange rates.

Between 2022 and 2025, Ecuador’s non-oil exports reached record levels while formal employment stayed near its historical low. Using quarterly data, we estimate the dynamic effect of oil and non-oil export shocks on the quantity and quality of employment with local-projection instrumental-variable methods, instrumenting each export block with world commodity prices. Both blocks are associated with a higher formal-employment share, but they differ in kind. For oil, the result is robust, surviving alternative control sets, sub-samples, re-sampling and a familywise correction across the outcome menu. For non-oil, it is suggestive: the first stage is weak and weak-instrument-robust regions are unbounded at every horizon, so the estimates speak to the direction and not to its size. Neither block raises total employment. Using household microdata on stated reasons for inactivity, we trace the oil-driven formalisation to a labour-supply response to higher household income rather than to hiring: the formal-employment share rises because informal employment contracts, not because formal employment expands. A five-candidate exercise localises the effect in no single fiscal instrument, indicating a diffuse income channel, where neither the interest rate nor the exchange rate is under domestic policy control. Export promotion and public spending are at most indirect routes to formal employment.