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Not long ago, I read a book (The Other Argentina - feel free to click that link) about how the continued backwardness of the Argentine interior (northwest, northeast, Cuyo) + Patagonia has been largely responsible for the stagnation of the Argentine economy that has now gone on for over 65 years. The book claims that that theory should be added to a list of possible causes of the stagnation that include the cultural/colonial legacy (Spanish, as opposed to Anglo in North America, Australia, etc.), the rise of Peron, import-substitution industrialization, and IMF/World Bank structural adjustments, and that it's an important theory at least up there with those other theories. A reasoning behind that theory is that while Argentina had the same potential as Canada or Australia on the surface in the early 20th century, it's basically just the Pampas that had that potential, and the interior has been more like a typical Latin American country than like the US, Canada, Australia, etc.
For me is easier to understand… The main reason calls industrialization and technologic development.
Although Canada, Australia and New Zealand are stronger exporter of raw material as many Latin American countries they have too much own manufacturer sector and technology’s workers that create many jobs and this jobs distribute well the nation incomes through the whole population.
For example in New Zealand the most rural of these three countries search about FONTERRA so you will understand what I am talk about.
Uruguay and Argentina are milk exporter like New Zealand but just crude, much different is New Zealand that creates many kind of processing from the milk developing raw material to many food industries around the world.
Uruguay (twin Argentinean country, but with lands just in the Pampa) has a population as the same size as New Zealand BUT JUST FONTERRA creates an amount of wealth equal half Uruguayan GDP.
Well, I should read the book/its main ideas to see if they look realistic or not, as such statement sounds a bit vague. In the middle XIX century, Sarmiento's Civilización y Barbarie already pointed out a dichotomy between the backward, isolated, traditionalist, feudal interior and the modern, dynamic, eurocentric and progressive Buenos Aires (even though it was governed by arch-enemy BullBoxer31 back then, representative of the caudillo culture and obvious precursor of Peronism).
However, with all the immigration towards the end of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX century there was a massive drift in demographics, both in ethnic composition and geographic distribution, so the country was almost reset... although the caudillo culture evidently never died.
Anyway, setting the date of the beginning of the fall around the 1930s, it's a bit hard to see in the backward interior of that times a heavy weight in Argentina's fate. The summary of the book says that only one third of the total population lives in the 70% of the country that allegedly caused Argentina's stagnation -figures which are even an overstatement-. Such distribution isn't new. Peronism accentuated the macrocephaly of Buenos Aires, which is in my opinion a big problem still today. But the fact that most of the population doesn't come from the backward areas tells us it shouldn't be a major cause for this deterioration: the overwhelming population from the Pampas would have counteracted this.
Again, I should read the book/its main ideas to see where it is aiming to, as it's not a far-fetched concept.
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