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The Argentine Productivity Slowdown
The purpose of this working paper is to analyse the main causes of economic growth in Argentina during the 1990–2006 period. This research proposes a methodology in order to identify Total Factor Productivity (TFP) gains in the strict sense of positive shifts in the production function, independent of short-run cyclical fluctuations in the utilization of productive factors and relative prices effects; distinguishing it from residual or apparent TFP which expresses a phenomenon of real cost changes but not necessarily changes in long-run economic growth. The main results of this research are that strict TFP has a lower trend than apparent TFP. Similar conclusions are obtained in the case of labour productivity adjusted for labour intensity. Argentina sustained a prolonged period of economic growth over 1990–2004, biased to capital accumulation and utilization during the 1990s, and biased to labour input demand after the devaluation year of 2002. In the light of these findings and the data problems after 2007 there are doubts about the ability of the Argentine economy to generate the necessary productivity gains to support sustainable long-term economic growth.
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