Overcoming the middle-income trap, tackling poverty and inequality and creating equal opportunities remain major policy challenges for policy makers in Latin American countries and beyond. In this paper, we put the focus on Latin America in particular because, contrary to other regions, Latin America hosts very limited cases of effective transitions from middle to high income levels. This paper looks at the issue from another perspective; namely tracing the evolution of structure of the economy over time, and its influence in facilitating income convergence through export-led growth. This analysis underscores that successful structural change is driven by proximity considerations – with expansion into related industries, making use of existing productive skills – while concomitantly accumulating more advanced capabilities.