Services as drivers of economic growth. Is there an opportunity for Latin America countries?

ABSTRACT

Considering the recent improvements in services innovation and productivity performance, the aim of the article is to analyze if they can act as a new growth driver for Latin American countries. For that, we review the literature on services and structural change in two stages. First, we apply a bibliometric methodology to identify the main trends in literature. Second, we analyze in-depth a smaller set of papers in order to extract the main lessons regarding three aspects of our question: (i) services and productivity growth, (ii) new opportunities for innovation in services and (iii) relation between services and manufacturing through servitization process. The results show that productivity and innovation growth in services are concentrated in only a few branches. Besides this, services performance depends on their links with manufacturing activities. We conclude that the current Latin American servitization process clausure opportunities for developing instead of opening them.

KEYWORDS:

• services
• growth drivers
• innovation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Searches were performed in October 2019.

2 We also performed searches in abstract and keywords, with more than 15.000, however, we observe too many irrelevant papers in that list.

3 Appendix A1 shows the network of literature about services productivity.

4 Appedix A2 shows the network of literature about services productivity.

5 Appendix A3 shows the network of literature about servicification of manufacture.