Structural change in four Latin American countries: An international perspective

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This paper compares structural change in four Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico) and seven additional countries which are taken as a reference: 5 European countries (France, Germany, United Kingdom, Italy and Spain), United States and Japan. It considers nine industries and covers the period 1995-2007. The information comes from EU KLEMS and LA KLEMS databases. It starts presenting, in section 2, the growth accounting results, decomposing labor productivity growth in the contribution of four sources of growth (Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) capital and non-ICT capital; labor qualification; and Total Factor Productivity (TFP)). Section 3 shows a set of descriptive statistics in order to help understand what happens inside each country as well as its implication for the shift-share analysis which is presented in section 4. The shift-share methodology is applied to each individual variable: (i) Labor productivity; (ii) Capital per worker —distinguishing between ICT and non-ICT capital—; and (iii) Total Factor Productivity. This section also analyses the sensitivity of the shift-share results to the level of industry disaggregation, taking Mexico and the reference countries as illustration.