Overcoming Latin America’s Stubborn Productivity Gap
By
Nur Cristiani, José Enrique Arrioja
One of the region’s most pressing issues offers an opportunity to governments and private companies alike.
Call it Latin America’s perennial challenge: Low productivity. Measured as output per worker or per hour, productivity in most of the region remains a fraction of that in advanced economies and has hardly improved over the past 75 years. The result is a development constraint that scholars and observers use to explain why Latin America and the Caribbean are currently immersed in a “low growth trap” that limits wages and political stability alike. Early last year, the UN Development Program concluded in a report that low productivity is one of the “biggest...
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