19.04.2014 Views

Exceptional Argentina Di Tella, Glaeser and Llach - Thomas Piketty

Exceptional Argentina Di Tella, Glaeser and Llach - Thomas Piketty

Exceptional Argentina Di Tella, Glaeser and Llach - Thomas Piketty

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.

which was wholly bound to local dem<strong>and</strong>: out of the 20 top countries by per capita GDP in<br />

1928, the size of the Argentine economy was only smaller than those of the U.S., Germany,<br />

Britain, France, Italy (which was #19 in per capita GDP) <strong>and</strong> Canada (which was only 8%<br />

larger than <strong>Argentina</strong>'s). Second, the marginal productivity of capital could have been<br />

increasing due to technological change. Third, in line with Gerchunoff <strong>and</strong> Aguirre (2006),<br />

the rise in the relative price of manufactures due to the negative terms of trade shock of the<br />

1920s could have had an effect on optimal factor choice. As a sector more capital- <strong>and</strong> laborintensive<br />

than agriculture, manufacturing growth should have the raised the dem<strong>and</strong> of both<br />

capital <strong>and</strong> labor. In a world of perfect factor mobility, there would have been no effect on<br />

relative factor prices. But if labor is assumed less mobile than capital, real wages would have<br />

increased <strong>and</strong> the relative price of capital vis a vis labor declined. The result would have been<br />

in line with what actually happened in the 1920s: manufacturing growing more than<br />

agriculture <strong>and</strong> both sectors becoming more capital intensive. Also consistently with this<br />

terms of trade explanation, the wage-rent ratio, that had fallen massively in the fifteen years to<br />

World War I, stabilized during the 1920s 20 .<br />

Figure 15. Values of different types of capital<br />

20000<br />

18000<br />

"Extensive"<br />

growth<br />

"Intensive"<br />

growth<br />

million 1950 pesos<br />

16000<br />

14000<br />

12000<br />

10000<br />

8000<br />

6000<br />

4000<br />

Capital in<br />

railways<br />

Capital in industrial<br />

machinery<br />

Capital in agro<br />

machinery<br />

2000<br />

0<br />

1876<br />

1879<br />

1882<br />

1885<br />

1888<br />

1891<br />

1894<br />

1897<br />

1900<br />

1903<br />

1906<br />

1909<br />

1912<br />

1915<br />

1918<br />

1921<br />

1924<br />

1927<br />

1930<br />

Sources: CEPAL (1959).<br />

4. Was <strong>Argentina</strong>'s prosperity sustainable?<br />

We have described in the previous sections some peculiarities of <strong>Argentina</strong> in the pre-<br />

Depression era. First, by the 1920s, <strong>Argentina</strong> was quite a rich economy, <strong>and</strong> an increasingly<br />

big one, as a result of exceptional per capita <strong>and</strong> total growth since its Agricultural Revolution<br />

of the late 19th, early 20th century. Second, though income wasn't unequally distributed<br />

between labor <strong>and</strong> other factors of production, it was unevenly spread geographically, <strong>and</strong><br />

20 The wage-rent ratio fell from an index of 580 in 1880-1884 to 53.6 in 1915-1919 <strong>and</strong> was still at 51 in 1925-<br />

1929. Williamson (2002), 73.

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!