When did Argentina lose its way?
This paper challenges the widely held hypothesis that Argentina’s economy performed relatively well until around 1974 and that its fabled economic decline began only after this year. Instead, it argues that the seeds of Argentina’s relative secular economic decline were sown in the 1940s, with the adoption of a corporatist regime with an import substitution industrialization (ISI) strategy which led to persistent relative price distortions, capital misallocation, and weak productivity growth.
