Dataset for: “Institutions: The Role of Institutional Quality in Technical Progress in the Latin American Region (2002–2019)”

This dataset contains a balanced panel of 18 Latin American countries covering the period 2002–2019. The database was constructed to analyze the role of institutional quality in explaining differences in total factor productivity (TFP) growth and technological convergence relative to the United States. The dataset includes variables from multiple international sources: – Total Factor Productivity (rtfpna) and technological distance measures derived from Penn World Table version 10.1. – Macroeconomic controls from the World Bank (World Development Indicators), including domestic investment (% of GDP), inflation, FDI inflows (% of GDP), exports (% of GDP), and imports (% of GDP). – Human capital and additional structural indicators. – Institutional quality indicators from the World Governance Indicators (WGI), including voice and accountability, political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption. The six WGI indicators were rescaled and used to construct a composite institutional quality index through Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The first principal component (factor1) captures the common institutional dimension across governance indicators. A normalized version of this component (normafactor1) and its first differences are also included in the dataset. The period 2002–2019 was selected based on data availability, macroeconomic stability, and econometric reliability.