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 1960 to 2000. It is shown that at least until 1975 factors of production (capital and education) were the main source of output dispersion across economies and that...