On the Role of Productivity and Factor Accumulation in Economic Development in Latin America and the Caribbean

Christian Daude and Eduardo Fernandez-Arias

No 4653, Research Department Publications from Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department

Abstract: This paper combines development and growth accounting exercises with economic theory to estimate the relative importance of total factor productivity and the accumulation of factors of production in the economic development performance of Latin America. The region’s development performance is assessed by contrast with various alternative benchmarks, both advanced countries and peer countries in other regions. The paper finds that total factor productivity is the predominant factor: low productivity and slow productivity growth, as opposed to impediments to factor accumulation, are the key to understanding Latin America’s low income relative to developed economies and its stagnation relative to other developing countries. While policies easing factor accumulation would help somewhat in improving productivity, for the most part, closing the productivity gap requires productivity-specific policies.

Keywords: Economic growth; Total factor productivity; Development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O11 O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-eff
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (45)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iadb.org/research/pub_hits.cfm?pub_id=I ... me=pubIDB-WP-155.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.iadb.org/research/pub_hits.cfm?pub_id=IDB-WP-155&pub_file_name=pubIDB-WP-155.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.iadb.org/research/pub_hits.cfm?pub_id=IDB-WP-155&pub_file_name=pubIDB-WP-155.pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: On the Role of Productivity and Factor Accumulation in Economic Development in Latin America and the Caribbean (2010)
Working Paper: On the Role of Productivity and Factor Accumulation in Economic Development in Latin America and the Caribbean (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:idb:wpaper:4653

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research Department Publications from Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Felipe Herrera Library ().