En relación a [PEN-L:1344] Argentina and the US,
el 6 Sep 00, a las 13:34, Jim Devine dijo:
> someone wrote:
> >Doug is right IMHO. Canada and Australia are the best examples of
> >what could have happened with Argentina if we were not a semicolony,
> >such as we are. There were wild dreams in Argentina during the 1890s
> >and 1900s, but the disease was there...
["Someone" being yours truly.]
>
> Brad asks: >But what in h*** was the disease. Canada, Australia,
> Argentina--three resource-based agricultural export-based European
> settler economies, all of them dependent on British capital, all of
> them becoming enormously rich at the end of the nineteenth century
> because of falling transport costs, high domestic productivity, and
> Europe's enormous and growing demand for agricultural goods. All face
> the problem of dealing with an unstable world economy while still
> being dependent on foreign capital, and all face the problem of
> turning agricultural resource-based wealth into human skill- and
> capital-based wealth. All three appear to be succeeding: B.A. was
> perhaps thirteenth among cities of the world in telephones per capita
> in 1913. Argentina was fifth in the world in automobiles per capita in
> 1929. Yet then things fall apart. The two *real* British colonies
> continue to grow rapidly. The semi-colony--in spite of what one would
> think of as the advantages of independence--does not...
The colonies, to begin with, were actual "settler colonies".
Argentina was not. Land distribution, rent distribution, and the
structure of the industrial sector, as well as the role the State
played in each case, made it illusory to imagine what the late 1800s
liked to call the "Grande Argentina", a country where 100 million of
thrifty Argentinians would live and be happy under the generous South
American Sun (not my own wording, trying to catch the grandeur of the
spirit of those times).
But backward economic relations prevailed in the countriside, and
most income from export trade was squandered by a rentistic oligarchy
that put their earnings not in investment but in luxury palaces and
travel to Europe (there were families who carried a cow with
themselves so that they could have fresh milk every morning, then
sacrificed the cow at Cherbourg, gave the spoils to the astonished
seamen).
The financial sector directed credit against industrial development,
basically due to British pressure, a pressure that was also exerted
through the British controlled transportation system. The British
railroads in Argentina were designed to act as an extension of
British overseas trade inland: a fan shaped structure stemming from
the great harbour of Buenos Aires (and the lesser harbours of Rosario
and Bahía Blanca) that through the management of freight rates and
the very shape of the network made it almost impossible to
Argentinian industrial production to reach our consumption centers,
while it made distance almost nil for outward bound grain and meat.
There was a structural linkage between the Argentinian landowners and
the British importers that made the whole economy turn around this
activity. A senior President of the oligarchic union of great
landowners put it very simply: "There must be one Argentinian for
each four cows, if we want to have a happy country". The rentistic
behaviour barred the road to increase of meat production by agrarian
modernization.
This is basically what happened to us.
Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
