Condiciones para el subdesarrollo sustentable de largo plazoel caso argentino durante la primera parte del siglo XX

Abstract

The performance of the Argentine economy throughout the twentieth century has generally been interpreted as disappointing. This work is part of a recent historiographical line that attenuates the idea of Argentine failure because it maintains that the initial conditions, at the beginning of the last century, were less promising than is believed. Here it is shown that the Argentina of the Belle Époque had, in international terms, a higher GDP per capita in relation to its human capital indicators. On the one hand, this work shows evidence of the significant growth of the Argentine economy that coincides with the expansion of the agricultural frontier, the arrival of the railroad and trade with the Atlantic. On the other hand, this works directs the eye on the interior of the country in relation to its levels of human capital. Surprisingly, and unlike in the United States, Australia, and Canada, higher school attendance as well as a higher enrollment rate did not correlate with higher literacy rates. We found that the factor that best explained them, on the other hand, was the presence of immigrants from a group of European countries and the richness of the soil. In Argentina in 1914, and although the efforts of the governments of the period to enhance education of the most backward areas of the country, Europeans and the wealth of land (translated into labor markets) were more important than the school to explain educational inequalities.