Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Thanks Brad, was The legacy of Juan Perón

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 06:15 AM 9/15/00 -0700, you wrote:
> > I don't pretend to know much about Peron's policies.  He had a basically
> > agricultural economy...
>
> In 1913 Buenos Aires is 13th in the world in telephones per capita. In
> 1929 Argentina is fifth in the world in automobiles per capita.

 these telephones and automobiles were imported, no? based on the rents
received by the land-owners (see below)?

> Argentinian manufacturing output per capita on the eve of World War II was
> twice that of Italy, and ahead of France.

this was a result of the import-substitution that preceded Perón, in
response to the slump of the world demand for Argentine beef and other
exports. Perón built on that...

> As I said quite a while ago, Argentina was a *first* *world* country--like
> Canada, Austrlia, or New Zealand--up until the 1950s. Arguments that
> development possibilites were constrained by relative backwardness may
> work elsewhere: they don't make *any* sense for Argentina.

Lost in the acrimonious debate between Néstor and Brad was the former's
response: the land-owners of Argentina were allied with (or under the thumb
of) the British to keep the country dependent on the latter, which had
long-term negative effects on its growth.

It's similar to a case that I'm more familiar with: in his POLITICAL
ECONOMY OF THE COTTON SOUTH, Gavin Wright argues that the South did very
well during the era before 1860 because the price of cotton was high.
Unfortunately, it got locked into a cotton-plantation-slavery complex (my
term) that meant that when world cotton prices fell, the South was going to
go into a severe tailspin, whether or not there was a Civil War.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine