Article at a glance:

Tapping Latin America's potential in services

• What restrains economic growth in Latin America? In part, it’s the weak performance of the region’s service sector.
• The sector’s share of GDP across Latin America is already comparable to its share in high-income economies, but productivity and wages remain low.
• Although policy changes have had some impact, reforms are needed to increase the flexibility of labor and to reduce the cost of doing business.
• Latin America’s biggest challenge is to make services the engine of high-value-added job growth, which is desperately needed in a region where workers are losing patience with economic reform.

Note: This article includes translations in Portuguese and Spanish.