cepr.org
When did Argentina lose its mojo?
There are recurrent debates about the ongoing underperformance of Argentina’s economy. This column proposes a metric to characterise and date Argentina’s divergence from a benchmark group of countries with comparable initial incomes per capita. The authors find Argentina’s divergence to be longer than usually conjectured, with marked tranches in the first half of the 20th century and the post-WWII period. They identify specific dates for the inflection points, discuss the context in each case, offer an explanation for the enduring divergence, and describe Argentina’s volatile chapter since the 1990s.
