Long waves in Argentinean economic development

JUAN EDUARDO SANTARCANGELO

Lille

Conferencia; Envisioning the economy of the future and the future of Political Economy; 2019

UNiversite de Lille and IIPPE

Long wave theories analyze capitalist history as divided between alternating periods of relatively successful expansion with other periods of relative stagnation and crisis. These theories generally view capitalism and its process of economic growth as inherently unstable and its debates can be linked to different traditions, such as the Marxian, Schumpeterian and Post-Keynesian theories. The aim of this paper is to analyze the existence (or not) of a long wave of capital accumulation in Argentina from the beginning of the XX century until the present. Argentina is a special case to analyze this phenomenon. On the one hand, there is an absolute lack of studies in long waves; and on the other, the country has been historically one of the three most developed in Latin America and reached during most of the twentieth century the most sophisticated industrial development in the region. In order to do this, the paper is structured in three main parts. First, we will present the main characteristics of the long wave theoretical framework and the evolution of its debates from the time of Nikolai Kondratieff in the 1920s until our days as well as the empirical evidence for long waves. Second, we will perform an empirical estimation of long waves for the case of Argentina focusing on the trends of the most important variables such as profitability, GDP and investment growth, real wages, technological change, unemployment, and prices. Finally, we will draw the main conclusions of the paper.