The Political Economy of Argentina, 1880–1946

229 Pages·1986·21.25 MB·English

by  Guido di Tella

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ARGENTINA, 1880-1946
THE POLITICAL
ECONOMY OF
ARGENTINA
1880-1946
Edited by
Guido di Tella
and
D. C. M. Platt
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-08043-4 ISBN 978-1-349-08041-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-08041-0
© St Antony's College, Oxford, 1986
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1986 978-0-333-39338-3
All rights reserved. For information, write:
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Printed in Hong Kong
Published in the United Kingdom by The Macmillan Press Ltd.
First published in the United States of America in 1986
ISBN 978-0-312-62252-7
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
The Political economy of Argentina, 1880-1946.
Includes index.
I. Argentina-Economic policy. I. Tella, Guido, 1931-
11. Platt, D. C.M. (Desmond Christopher StMartin), 1934
HC175.P62 1985 338.982 85-11896
ISBN 978-0-312-62252-7
To Raul Prebisch
Elder Statesman of the Emerging Nations
Contents
List of Tables ix
Editors' Note and Publishers' Note X
Preface XI
Notes on the Contributors Xlll
Domestic Finance in the Growth of Buenos Aires,
1880-1914 1
D. C. M. Platt
2 The Relationship between Labour and Capital in Rural
Argentina, 1880-1914 15
JosephS. Tulchin
3 The Argentine Export Economy: Intimations of
Mortality, 1894-1930 39
Tulia Halperin
4 The Argentine Economy, 1890-1914: Some Salient
Features 60
David Rock
5 Free Trade in One (Primary Producing) Country: the
Case of Argentina in the 1920s 74
A. O'Connell
6 The Economic Formulae of the 1930s: a Reassessment 95
Peter Alhadeff
7 Economic Controversies in Argentina from the 1920s to
the 1940s 120
Guido di Tel/a
Vll
Vlll Contents
8 Argentine Economic Policies since the 1930s:
Recollections 133
Raul Prebisch
9 The Origin of Argentina's Sterling Balances, 1939-43 154
Jorge Fodor
10 The United States, Britain and Argentina in the Years
immediately after the Second World War 183
C. A. M acDona/d
Postscript and Conclusions 201
Guido di Tel/a and D. C. M. Piau
Index 213
List of Tables
2.1 Capital invested in agriculture (by Pampean region),
1914 25
6.1 Real expenditure, 1928-39 97
6.2 Public expenditure and budgetary results as a proportion
of total production, 1928-39 99
6.3 Annual debt service as a proportion of export value,
public expenditure and revenue, 1929-36 101
6.4 Domestic and foreign composition of the annual service
of the public debt, 1929-37 103
6.5 Money in circulation and means of payment, 1929-40 106
9.1 Variations in means of payments, 1939-44 177
IX
Editors' Note
This book is the second in the St Antony's/Macmillan series to be
devoted to the economic and social history of modern Argentina. The
first volume- Platt and di Tella (eds and contrs), Argentina, Australia
and Canada: Studies in Comparative Development, 1870-1965- was
published in 1985. The editors hope that subsequent volumes will
include a follow-up on the political economy of Argentina since 1946, a
further comparative work on social experiments in regions of recent
European settlement (Argentina, Australia and Canada, 1880-1940),
and an analysis of the relative position of Britain and the United States
in Argentina during and after the Second World War. Other volumes,
prepared and edited by Argentine scholars, are planned in the Republic
for themes such as communications, finance and banking, industrialisa
tion, and the development of the pastoral and agricultural sectors.
Publishers' Note
The volume is published with the aid of a grant from the Latin American
Publications Fund.
X
Preface
In substance, this book is the outcome of a conference held at St
Antony's College, Oxford, in July 1981. The conference discussed the
political economy of Argentina for the first half of the twentieth century,
a period of critical importance to the Republic during which Argentina
moved from an optimism induced by great expansion to the doubts and
vacillations which have since preoccupied us all. The papers and
subsequent discussion brought together both academics who had
worked on developments in Argentina over the period and a group of
distinguished public servants who had played a leading role during the
later decades. The interaction was interesting, more particularly in the
shape of the reactions of public servants to the inferences and
conclusions of academics on their behaviour and motivation at the time.
As Prebisch pointed out, scholars are better informed today about some
aspects of the past even than the leading actors of the time. While
contemporaries had to guess the intentions of others, we know today,
from local and foreign sources, rather more about what these intentions
might actually have been.
In the first part of the book we publish four papers for the years before
the First World War. They consider the role of domestic and foreign
finance in the expansion of Buenos Aires, the differences in labour and
capital usage between the various kinds of agricultural frontier, the
emergence of doubt as to the possibility of continuing the geographical
expansion of the frontier, and the position arrived at by the Argentine
economy just before the First World War. The papers were contributed
by D. C. M. Platt, JosephS. Tulchin, Tulio Halperin and David Rock
respectively.
The conference then turned its attention to the inter-war years, to the
policies of the 1920s and 1930s, and to the analysis of the economic
controversies which surrounded both the transitory nature of agricul
tural expansion and the need for alternative paths of development for
the national economy. The academic argument was presented by
Arturo O'Connell, Peter Alhadeff and Guido di Tella, and it contrasts
with what Raul Prebisch, a leading policy-maker at the time, was able to
xi