In a widely cited paper, Young (1995) showed that the East Asian miracles (Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan) grew mostly through input accumulation during the period 1966-1990. Using data for 83 countries taken from the Penn World Table, version 6.1, and Barro and Lee (2000), we use a...

Due to widespread government intervention and import-substitution industrialization, there has been a general perception that Latin America has been much less productive than the leading economies in the last decades. In this paper, however, we show that until the mid-seventies Latin America had...

This article presents a group of exercises of level and growth decomposition of output per worker using cross-country data from 1970 to 2000. It is shown that in the early seventies factors of production (capital and education) were the main source of output dispersion across economies and that...

This article examines the e¤ects of sectorial shifts and structural transformation on the recent productivity path of Latin America. We use a four-sector (agriculture, industry, modern services and traditional services) general equilibrium model calibrated to the main economies in the region....

We study the impact of distortions in the investment goods sector on aggregate total factor productivity (TFP). We develop a two-sector neo- classical growth model in which TFP in the capital goods sector relative to TFP in the consumption sector is inversely related to the price of invest- ment...

Fiscal policy in Latin America has been guided primarily by short-term liquidity targets whose observance was taken as the main exponent of fiscal prudence, with attention focused almost exclusively on the levels of public debt and the cash deficit. Very little attention was paid to the effects...

Fiscal policy in Latin America has been guided primarily by short-term liquidity targets whose observance was taken as the main exponent of fiscal prudence, with attention focused almost exclusively on the levels of public debt and the cash deficit. Very little attention was paid to the effects...