Productivity and Factor Accumulation in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Database

Most countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have been growing slowly for a long time and see themselves still poor relative to the rest of the world, both advanced countries and peer countries in other regions. Low productivity and insufficient productivity growth, as opposed to impediments to factor accumulation, is the key to understanding LAC’s low income relative to developed economies and its stagnation relative to other developing countries that are catching up. Daude and Fernández-Arias (2010) calculate measures of total factor productivity (TFP) for a cross section of countries and show that TFP is the principal driver of the slow development of LAC. This database provides this measure of TFP updated until 2010 along with the inputs used to calculate it and other measures of productivity.