Abstract While the accumulation of factors of production, both physical and human capital, has helped Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) to narrow the income gap with developed economies, aggregate productivity is still relatively low. Although there are numerous determinants of aggregate productivity, it is largely based on the underlying productivity of all firms in the economy. Using firm-level data from several waves of the World Bank Enterprise Survey and Chile's National Manufacturing Survey, we explore the ‘what’ question on productivity dispersion in LAC. We document three stylized facts: (i) there are significant differences in firm productivity within industries – the firm at the 90th percentile of the productivity distribution produces almost seven times as much output (using the same measured inputs) as the 10th percentile firm; (ii) productivity differences persist over time – regressing a firm's current productivity on its one-year lagged productivity yields an autoregressive coefficient of around 0.9; and (iii) most of the growth in aggregate productivity comes from improvements in the productivity of existing firms.

中文翻译：

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拉丁美洲和加勒比地区的企业生产力

摘要 虽然物质资本和人力资本等生产要素的积累帮助拉美和加勒比地区（LAC）缩小了与发达经济体的收入差距，但总体生产率仍然较低。尽管总生产率有许多决定因素，但它主要基于经济中所有企业的潜在生产率。使用来自世界银行企业调查和智利国家制造业调查的几波公司层面的数据，我们探讨了拉丁美洲生产率分散的“什么”问题。我们记录了三个典型的事实：(i) 行业内的企业生产率存在显着差异——处于生产率分布第 90 个百分点的企业生产的产出（使用相同的测量投入）几乎是第 10 个百分点企业的 7 倍；(ii) 生产力差异随着时间的推移持续存在——将公司当前的生产力对其滞后一年的生产力进行回归，得出的自回归系数约为 0.9；(iii) 总生产力的大部分增长来自现有企业生产力的提高。