Glaspie/Hussein ...

Bradford DeLong jbdelong at uclink.berkeley.edu
Tue Nov 12 09:28:29 PST 2002



>Bradford DeLong wrote:
>
>>There is, however, another point of view, a point of view that
>>looks deeper into Argentinean history.
>
>There's an individual tale for every middle- and low-income country
>that explains its underdevelopment. But what about the system as a
>whole? Why do the same countries repeatedly fail to close the gap
>with the high-income countries? Aren't there some broader structural
>constraints on them - the heritage of imperialism, enforced
>technological backwardness, export orientation, the endless burden
>of debt? I don't expect John Taylor to talk about that, but I'd
>expect a distinguished economic historian to.
>
>Doug

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



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