intro 1.0

With some proper definition of the words, Argentina is the only country to have descended from the First to the Third World in the modern era. In fact, if three ranges of national per capita income are defined by dividing in three the per capita income of the world’s richest country at each point in time, Argentina was well in the highest third (77% of that of the US) in 1909, after a period of rapid convergence starting in the 1880s and, as argued below, continued until 1930 (when the ratio to the US was around two thirds). By the end of the twentieth century, however, Argentina’s per capita income represented just 30% of the American figure, after decades dominated by divergence from the rich.

Any explanation of such a unique economic experience (steep convergence followed by gradual divergence) necessarily has to be somewhat nuanced. There just aren’t any other countries with a comparable economic trajectory during the period 1880-2000, so that general hypotheses treating Argentina as a “case” (whether by placing it among the land-abundant, the Latin American, the institutionally frail or the Southern-Conist) will be bound to failure, as Argentina’s long term performance diverged significantly from every one of her likely companions in those categories.

A claim for uniqueness is, however, a recipe for ad-hoc reasoning and unverifiable explanations. A possible middle way, which we follow in this piece, is to assimilate Argentina’s experience to that of different countries for each of the subperiods we’ll be analyzing – maybe Argentina is, after all, “a case” until 1930 (the convergence era), another one in 1930-1975 (the slow divergence epoch) and still a different “case” in 1975-2000 (when rapid divergence prevailed). Such a procedure will, of course, beg the question of the transitions from each case to the next one, so that much of our effort will concentrate in trying to explain those transitions. It is through this panel data narrative of sorts that we will try to account for Argentina’s long twentieth century economic performance.

[Después casi todo el argumento se reduce a este gráfico:]