Brazil and South Korea: Two Tales of a Middle-Income Trap

The middle-income trap may well characterize the experience of Brazil and most of Latin America since the 1980s. Conversely, South Korea maintained its pace of evolution, reaching a high-income status.

Such divergence of economic growth can be related to their distinctive performances of domestic accumulation of technological and organizational capabilities. Their different approaches to global value chains and trade globalization reinforced such discrepancy in domestic accumulation processes.