This article is the first of its kind to offer a quantitative estimation of the evolution of Latin American agricultural production and productivity between 1950 and 2008. It also uncovers the extent to which the increases in production were due to increases in factors of production or to efficiency gains. Our findings reveal that efficiency gains made a rather modest contribution to the substantial increase in production, although their role became increasingly large over time and were highly significant between 1994 and 2008. Capital was the most important productive factor in explaining increases in output.

In the second half of the twentieth century, Latin American countries lost a substantial part of their importance in worldwide exports of agricultural and food products. Given this context, the objective of this article is to analyse the determinants of the evolution of agricultural exports from Latin America, paying special attention to the influence of regional processes of economic integration on exports and to their degree of participation in intra-industrial trade. We propose a gravity model with a data panel of total exports and product groups for six Latin American countries towards 39 destinations between 1963 and 2000.