The Elusive Quest for Growth in Argentina

DANIEL CHUDNOVSKY, ANDRÉS LÓPEZ

Palgrave

Año: 2007 p. 214

Despite its unusually rich availability of natural resources and ample base of human capital, in the last forty years Argentina had a poor growth performance in any cross country comparison.  Our analysis includes two growth episodes in 1964-74 and in 1991-98 that proved to be finally unsustainable, as well as the 2001 crisis, the most severe in the country’s history. Since both growth episodes took place under quite different development paradigms (i.e. Post-War Development Consensus and Washington Consensus), lessons about what went right and wrong in Argentina may also contribute to the debate about the virtues and failures of those paradigms. Following mainly an institutional and historical approach, but also employing rigorous economic analysis, this book offers a timely contribution to one of the big puzzles in the field of development economics