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

Christian Daude and Eduardo Fernandez-Arias

No 1696, IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank

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 regions 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 Americas 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: IDB-WP-155 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O11 O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-02
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english ... nd-the-Caribbean.pdf (application/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:brikps:1696

Access Statistics for this paper

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