Historia económica de la Argentina en el siglo XIX is an introduction to the history of Argentina's economy during its most successful period, as the author points out. In the century covered by the book Argentina reached its prime economic development, rising from a remote colonial outpost to become the most prosperous and fastest-growing country in the Iberian New World. It might have also qualified as a member of the G8 of the time. For this book, Roy Hora, a social and economic historian of the late nineteenth century, draws on a stream of economic historical research that has developed in Argentina in the last 30 or 40 years to offer a concise summary and general introduction to the subject.
This 269-page book is part of the Biblioteca Básica de Historia collection, which features some of the most established historians in the country and is aimed at the general reader following Argentina's renewed interest in its past. Hence the lack of references and the minimal empirical support; yet the book is very well written and should succeed at reaching a wide audience. A small but select collection of tables, graphs and pictures interspersed throughout the text contribute to a very effective account of the economic, social and institutional trajectory of Argentina from the late eighteenth century to the First World War.
The narrative starts with the economy in the colonial period and analyses three subsequent stages of Argentine export-led growth according to the dominant commodity at each time – hides, wool, and beef and grain – though agriculture has received probably less attention than it deserves. Four core chapters describe the expansion of cattle ranching and sheep farming fostered by the so-called ‘opening to Atlantic commerce’. This juncture, which is associated with the end of Spanish mercantilism, led to a boom in pastoral exports. Differences in the quality of factor endowments explain the pace of growth and the increasing regional divergence between a dynamic Littoral and the landlocked interior. However, most of the narrative relates to the province of Buenos Aires.
Two more chapters look in depth at the factors behind the ‘boom exportador’, namely foreign labour, capital and transport technology. Surprisingly the analysis of grain exports, which occupied most of the foreign labourers and constituted the most capital-intensive industry, is limited. Turning inwards to reveal linkages and the stimuli from the extraordinary development of rural exports, Hora describes the expansion of the domestic markets, caused by greater geographic integration, and of consumption driven by higher incomes, all of which fostered an incipient import substituting industrialisation that benefited from the vagaries of the monetary regime and high tariffs, although there is little in the book about these issues. Hora emphasises the production of sugar in Tucumán and of wine in Mendoza as exceptions to the increasing regional disparities. These crops in the interior benefited from growing urban domestic demand stimulated by the boom, but also from heavily protectionist policies.
A short final chapter offers a retrospective look at the situation by the 1910s and assesses Argentina's economic development over the century. Hora finds a ‘less dynamic economy and more conflictive century’ ahead and dates the ending of this export-led growth with another exogenous shock – the Great War. In both the chronology and in the driving forces singled out for the rise and demise of Argentina's ‘golden era’, the book largely agrees with a number of common traits about the economic trajectory of the country which are now part of the conventional wisdom. Hora warns in the introduction that many of the topics still demand further research and reflection (p. 12), though there is no obvious lead to which ones. Admittedly his is a synthesis and interpretation of developments which ‘depends more on the quality, ambition and originality of the existing scholarship than on [his] own contribution’ (p. 12). Clearly the argument presented by Hora builds on those of Halperín Donghi, Cortes Conde and Gallo, and many others who rewrote the socio-economic history of Argentina against the revisonista school – notably back in vogue today.
Hora has added some candid insights on more current concerns like inequality and the distribution of the gains from the export boom. At the end of each chapter there are some general comments on equality and living standards during the period in question. Hora's conclusion is that this prosperity did not include everybody. The role of the state in providing public goods such as education, health and infrastructure was the channel for redistribution which improved living standards despite the observed reduction in real wages. Yet there is little about the sources of revenues or their sustainability, or on the distribution of assets. Land was free and public and as such privatised throughout the century according to fiscal circumstances, with lasting effects on wealth distribution. But land distribution and accumulation are barely mentioned.
Social inequality is appraised from growing income disparities, and Hora shows how real wages stagnated and landed fortunes increased. As the frontier was closed and labour/land ratios inverted, Argentine agriculture reached the margins of the country's fertile arable land and workers suffered a clear deterioration of their bargaining power. Inevitably, immigration ceased and foreign capital withdrew. The war in Europe only speeded up this process, and remarkably Argentina never again returned to the path to prosperity. It is clear that the growth of exports was extensive and productivity was declining well before the disruption. Boldly, Hora argues that the extraordinary performance in exports is explained not by the quality of Argentina's institutions, the entrepreneurial skills of its businessmen or the clairvoyance of its elites, but by the ‘extraordinary abundance of [the country's] natural resources’. This interpretation sounds very much like that put forward in Di Tella and Zymelman's Las etapas del desarrollo económico argentino (Eudeba, 1967), which surprisingly does not appear in the bibliography. As it was fashionable in the 1960s, one still wonders why Argentina is not Australia or Canada? But the book misses the opportunity to explore this.
Still, in 2010, when Hora's book was published, Argentina was enjoying another period of stellar economic performance. Driven by Asian imports of soy beans and oil, the country had been growing at ‘Chinese rates’ for the previous six or seven years. Without an open frontier this time, GM crops allowed the expansion of exports and macro-economic engineering of fiscal and monetary policies sustained a demand for domestic manufacturing that rescued Argentina from the ashes of the economic (and political) meltdown in 2001. Nonetheless, living standards are falling and real wages are being seriously eroded by inflation at the moment. Exports are still very large, but productivity is faltering. As was the case a century ago, the determinants of Argentine economic wonders and blunders seem to be elsewhere. The puzzle today is why Argentina is not Brazil or Chile.
