EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Innovation, absorptive capacity and growth heterogeneity: Development paths in Latin America 1970–2010

Fulvio Castellacci and José Natera

Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, 2016, vol. 37, issue C, 27-42

Abstract: The paper carries out an analysis of long-run development paths in Latin America in the period 1970–2010. We focus on three main dimensions—openness, industrial structure and innovation—and analyze how changes in these factors, and the specific combination of them adopted by each country, have affected its income per capita growth. We apply Johansen cointegration approach to time series data for 18 Latin American countries. The analysis leads to two main results. First, we show that Latin American countries have followed different growth trajectories depending on the combination of policies they have adopted to catch up. Secondly, we find a clear correspondence between policy strategies, on the one hand, and growth performance, on the other. Countries that have managed to combine imitation and innovation policy have experienced a higher rate of growth than those economies that have only made efforts to improve their imitation capability.

Keywords: O1; O3; O4; Economic growth; Heterogeneity; Development paths; Long-run causality; Latin America (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0954349X15000600
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:streco:v:37:y:2016:i:c:p:27-42

DOI: 10.1016/j.strueco.2015.11.002

Access Statistics for this article

Structural Change and Economic Dynamics is currently edited by F. Duchin, H. Hagemann, M. Landesmann, R. Scazzieri, A. Steenge and B. Verspagen

More articles in Structural Change and Economic Dynamics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:streco:v:37:y:2016:i:c:p:27-42