Those are hard questions. But it is hard to see how they apply to Argentina.
My friend Andrei Shleifer has a theory about how Spanish colonial settlement--inside or outside the tropics--is death to economic development because it leaves you with a very bad income distribution, a hideously inefficient mercantilist government, and a post-reformation Catholic fear of mass education. But Argentina was doing *fine* up until the end of World War II, so Andrei's theory--although it works well in today's cross-section--doesn't match up with historical development.
Arthur Lewis had (and more lately Jim Robinson and others have) a theory about how European colonization of *tropical* areas is disastrous for their subsequent economic development because European settlers and governors don't like living in the tropics, fear the tropics, and get sick in the tropics--hence tropical colonization leads to destructive "extractive" institutions. But Argentina isn't tropical. All other countries with Argentina's settlement patterns and resource endowments have done fine: Canada, New Zealand, Australia.
I think Argentina, and Uruguay, and Chile (the latter with an assist from Richard Nixon, Richard Helms, and company) are *sui generis*--countries that have fallen off the path of economic and political development that leads to utopia in an interesting but unusual way that carries few lessons for anyplace else. I think Argentina, and Uruguay, and Chile are best thought of as western European countries where the destructive proto- and neo-fascist downward political spirals of the interwar period never came to an end...
Brad DeLong