Latin American countries are the only Western countries that are poor and that aren't gaining ground on the United States. This paper evaluates why Latin America has not replicated Western economic success. We find that this failure is primarily due to TFP differences. Latin America's TFP gap is...

We calibrate a macroeconomic model with epidemiological restrictions using Colombian data. The key feature of our model is that a portion of the population is immune and cannot transmit the virus, which improves substantially the fit of the model to the observed contagion and economic activity...