17 - Argentina: Economy, 1870–1914

Summary

The best and most complete bibliographical study of the economic history of Argentina in the period 1870–1914 is Tulio Halperín Donghi, ‘Argentina’, in Roberto Cortés Conde and Stanley J. Stein (eds.), Latin America: A Guide to Economic History 1830–1930 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977). Among the general works which appeared after the Second World War, Ricardo M. Ortiz, História economica de la Argentina, 1850–1930, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires, 1955) was, for many years, the most widely read work on the economic history of Argentina. During the 1960s two works in this field were to have a significant influence: Aldo Ferrer, La economía argentina: Las etapas de su desarrollo y problemas actuates (Buenos Aires, 1963) which, like Celso Furtado’s study of Brazil, examines the structure of the economy from the colonial period to the present and is strongly influenced by the literature on development from ECLA/CEPAL; and Guido Di Tella and Manuel Zymelman, Las etapas del desarrollo económico argentino (Buenos Aires, 1967), originally conceived as a thesis under the supervision of W. W. Rostow, which accepts the rapid growth of the period 1880–1914 and seeks to explain why it was not sustained after 1914. See also the essays in D. C. M. Platt and G. Di Telia (eds.), The Political Economy of Argentina, 1880–1946 (London, 1986), including David Rock, ‘The Argentine economy, 1880–1914: Some salient features’.