CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

During the last eighty years Argentina experience two very different economic schemes. The first, that run from the 1930s to mid seventies, called ?Industrialization by Import Substitution? (ISI) was characterized ?in general terms- for promoting manufacturing industries through a strong domestic market created by distribution policies and high wages. The second one, with no consensual name, was implemented though commercial and financial openness . In short, the internal drive (domestic market) of growth was changed for an external drive (exports). In the latter scheme, wage compression is deemed necessary in order to compensate the observed slow productivity pace achieving, therefore, ?competitiveness?. Making a long story short, that didn?t succeed regarding growth but was extremely successful in lowering real wages. At the core of this debate lies the question regarding the role of real wages ?and income distribution- in economic development. Despite the importance attached by the most diverse theories and its key role in research and in the economic debate in Latin America (within the context of the Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) model), the analysis of this relationship has been progressively set aside since the mid-1970s, especially in Argentina, where such process was accompanied by a lack of adequate official statistics. The study of this subject allows us to reveal how workforce is allocated in the different economic schemes, through the analysis of the evolution of the relation between labour productivity and real wages. With that objective, Section 1 shows our approach to functional income distribution and its evolution in Argentina . In Section 2, we address its determining factors (productivity and real wages) as well as its trends. In every case we will make comparative analysis with other countries as Japan, Mexico and USA. Last, Section 3 includes some partial conclusions and questions for further analysis.

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