According to the Washington Consensus, developing countries’ growth would benefit from reductions in barriers to trade. However, the empirical basis for judging trade reforms is weak. Econometrics are mostly ad hoc; results are typically not judged against models; policies are poorly measured;...

This paper combines development accounting exercises with economic theory to assess the importance of total factor productivity and the accumulation of factors of production as engines of growth in Latin America. Using the new, drastically revised Penn World Table (PWT) and Barro-Lee datasets,...