TFP growth in Argentina during the 1990's: a stylized fact?

Abstract

The main purpose of the paper is that the apparent nature of productivity gains may be due to error identification. Through an exhaustive analysis of economic growth sources and a consistent statistical methodology, it will be shown that the Argentine economy during the nineties had an extensive growth type based on factor accumulation rather than on organization improvements independent of such accumulation. This might be the reason why "spill over" effects were absent in this apparent productivity growth which did not generate a sustainable increase of real income in the economy as a whole. The present work has been divided into four sections: the first section discusses the importance of productivity for economic analysis; the second one details the concept of productivity that is relevant for the purposes of this work; the third one analyzes the methodology used for estimating the contribution of productive factors to economic growth (Appendix 1 discusses these methodologies in analytically detail). The fourth section offers the main results obtained by applying this methodology to the Argentine case during the nineties. Finally, conclusions are drawn.