Halfway jokingly, an eminent U.S. based economic historian used to say that gathering one Israeli and an Argentine economist would make a full-fledged economics department. The number of talented Argentine economists and research students in the international academia—and working in international financial institutions—is even more striking once compared with the financial predicament of their country. Nueva Historia Economica de Argentina edited by the most insightful economic historians of their generations, is an authoritative review of the most recent scholarship which engages with the big issues of Argentina’s remarkable economic history.

The book organization is ingenious and works. Despite the ten chapters covering specific themes and periods, they effectively historicize the trajectory of the economy. The first three discuss the production and aggregated performance over time, from the post-independence period, to the Golden Age between 1870 and 1913, and throughout the twentieth century. Two subsequent chapters develop the monetary, financial, and fiscal aspects between 1860 and 1945; and two more analyze the demographic features of labor and institutional aspects of labor markets in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The final two narrate the history of business and entrepreneurship, and survey relevant sources and the statistical information available for further research, respectively. The quality of the analysis, the insight provided and the breath of the literature— international and domestic—discussed in each chapter are a testimony to the robustness of the Argentinean scholarship.

The editors’ preface summarizes the development of the historiography placing authors and their contemporary research preoccupations as way of context; it reveals how poorly theories and economic models, past and current, serve to illuminate the paradoxes of Argentina. The absence of an afterword, or final balance, is not a prejudice, but an intimation of the anxiety and frustration of economic historians to explain Argentina troubled economy, and echoes the perplexity of foreign scholars seeking to explain repeated failure of economic policies and institutions. Crisis has become the steady state. The recurrence of “stops and goes” at ever shortening time spans and failure of inconsequential—if not counterproductive reforms—has created a path-dependence that no conceivable political regime seems able to break up. Financial liberalization or capital controls, suffocating tariffs fostering industrial development or trade liberalization, deregulation and wild privatizations directed to structurally reform the state and reinstate the market have made no difference over time. Democratically elected or imposed military regimes, staunch statist or neoliberal Peronists leaders, populist, and no so populist administrations defy any identification problem of economic theories and models.

At the time of this review, another crisis is breaking, triggered by outcome of compulsory, open, and simultaneous primaries—in practice a mock general election—held on 11 August 2019. With 75 percent turnout they destroyed the re-election hopes of the incumbent administration. Overnight, the Argentina peso devalued 22 percent to the U.S. dollar; government bonds fell by 40 percent in a week and interest rates leaped over 70 percent. With inflation rates at 50 percent, 18 percent of under- and unemployment rates (GDP shrank nearly 6 percent last year) and a third of the population living below the poverty line, these numbers will only get worse. With a $324 billion sovereign debt that amounts to 86 percent of GDP (with 75 percent of it denominated in foreign currency) and with sticky primary deficits (though shrinking latterly) the Central Bank is burning reserves to anchor the peso freefall—$4 billion or 4 percent of the country reserves were lost in the first week after the vote. With annual exports valued at $5.6 billion and a budget deficit of 5 percent of GDP in 2018, the U.S. $14 billion of interest for public and private debt due in 2020 markets are jittery.

In this context, Chapter 6, “A constant in the Argentine macroeconomic evolution: money, debt, and crisis” (my translation) by Laura D’Amato and Sebastian Katz is worth delving into. The title paraphrases Cortes Conde’s Dinero, Deuda y Crisis (Sudamericana, 1989) published in the aftermath of the 1989 hyperinflation and the chapter builds on Della Paolera, et al. “Passing the buck” chapter on the monetary and fiscal history of A New Economic History of Argentina (Cambridge, 2003) published in the wake of the 2001 crisis. Covering macroeconomic history up to 2015, Chapter 6 is the most current analysis in the book. It is incisive at dissecting balance of payment crises the country experienced since 1945, that is, in 1975, 1989, and 2001 and unintendedly portends the ongoing one in 2019. It is remarkable how orthodox and creative monetary policies and all sort of transformative institutional reforms systematically failed sooner or later. Argentina has lurched from hyperinflation to massive deflationary episodes within a matter of 12 years, to fall back into rampant inflation within another decade or so. After six or seven years of extraordinary growth between 2004 and 2012, which reduced the Gini coefficient by 12 points between 2001 and 2016, the inconsistency of the budget and pro-cyclicality of fiscal policies kicked in again. D’Amato and Katz attribute this to “systematic short run policy objectives” which worsen the results of fiscal and monetary inconsistencies. Hence, deficits, massive indebtedness, and high inflation finally coalesced into an overvalued exchange rate with well-known detrimental effects in the real economy. However, these are the symptoms, rather than the causes of the crises, which the authors assign to a “chronic distributive conflict”—a concept in vogue in the 1970s, which unfortunately they do not elaborate much on. Yet, the chapter accurately diagnoses the situation today; and it is good omen to consider that the present crisis is unlikely to be the last—one given immediate measures taken by the Administration to foster consumption and protect waged middle class voters in the short run, while assuming that they will be revenue “neutral.”

Nueva Historia Economica has too little on old issues such as taxation, wide political representation in a “delegative” democracy and perverse redistributive spending; also the political economic analysis is very circumstantial. Throughout, Argentina has been over-dependent on foreign capital, it represented half of total capital stock in the golden age, and accounts for half of the country debt today. Low rates of domestic savings, shallow financial markets, and excessive reliance on volatile financial flows and commodity exports for revenues are similarly chronic, which have become endogenous by now. Argentina’s extreme comparative advantages which allow substantial gains from international trade in favorable times also exacerbate the redistributive effects in tough times. When the present administration issued the “hundred years” government dollar denominated sovereign bonds in 2017 they were four times oversubscribed; but lost nearly 40 percent of their value in the week following the primaries. This time, the trigger was a purely domestic event. Without a candid examination of the causes of the crises it is very likely they will recur. On a good day, a hopeful Argentinian may optimistically think that this cataclysm will finally give way to the “creative destruction” of chronically inconsistent fiscal policies; however, this book superbly delivers a corrective pessimism based on economic history.