This article seeks to analyse some mesoeconomic and microeconomic aspects related with productivity and international competitiveness in the context of the new Latin American economic model. These aspects go a long way towards explaining why those variables have not evolved satisfactorily in the different countries and sectors of activity, and why a strictly macroeconomic reading prevents a proper understanding of the changes which are taking place in society at the economic, technological and institutional levels, as well as impeding the identification of a public policy agenda which could help improve the implications of the process of change which is under way. Within this process, new patterns of micro-economic behaviour have been taking shape in which imported capital goods and intermediate imputs have been displacing locally produced goods and the local technological efforts associated with their production. This has been giving rise to a new production organization model which is more closely linked with external sources of growth than in the past.