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...

We study the macroeconomic effects of international trade policy by integrating a Hecksher-Ohlin trade model into an optimal-growth framework. The model predicts that a more open economy will have higher factor productivity. Furthermore, there is a "selective development trap" to which countries...

This article presents evidence on the positive effect of international trade on productivity growth using industrial level data preceding and following Brazil's trade liberalization in 1988-90. Our data reveal large and widespread productivity improvement across industries after barriers to...