This paper examines the aggregate productivity performance and discusses the economic growth experience in Latin America. A translog stochastic frontier is fitted with inefficiency effects to a panel of 19 Latin American countries for the period 1961 to 1990. Estimate productivity growth is decomposed into two components: technological progress and efficiency change. We use Malmquist Index to calculate total productivity factor (TFP) change. Applying international data sets, this study aims to: (1) examine the contribution of productivity to economic growth in Latin America, (2) investigate the sources of technical inefficiency, and (3) shed some light on the perfomance among Latin America economies. With this framework we show that total productivity factor perfomance was the main reason for low growth of Latin America.
economic growth; stochastic production frontier; total productivity of factors
