Argentina's capital gap puzzle

Abstract

Argentina’s GDP per working age person in 2003 was about the same as it was twenty years earlier and around fifteen percent below trend. By international standards that has been a dismal performance whose ultimate sources are important to uncover to eventually reverse that country’s seemingly secular decline. The purpose of this paper is precisely to take a first step towards that understanding. To that effect, we examine Argentina’s recent growth experience, which includes two deep recessions and a recovery, with the lens of a neoclassical growth model that takes total factor productivity as exogenous.Argentina