For the first time in its history, Latin America can benefit from not one but three major engines of world growth. Until the 1980s, the United States was the region's major trade partner. In the 1990s, a second growth engine emerged with the European investment boom in Latin America. Now, at the...

Tables of national competitiveness give an easily comparable ranking of the winners and losers of global economic competition, but they do not explain why the poor countries are four times less productive than the rich ones or why some rich countries are twice as productive as others. Using...