Argentine trade policies in the XX century: 60 years of solitude

• Main Authors: Irene Brambilla, Sebastian Galiani, Guido Porto
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas 2018-02-01
• Series: Latin American Economic Review
• Subjects: Tariff protection; Export taxes on agriculture; Anti-export bias
• Online Access: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40503-017-0050-9

Abstract At the turn of the last century, the Argentine economy was on a path to prosperity that never fully developed. International trade and trade policies are often identified as a major culprit. In this paper, we review the history of Argentine trade policy to uncover its exceptional features and to explore its contribution to the Argentine debacle. Our analysis tells a story of bad trade policies, rooted in distributional conflict and shaped by changes in constraints, that favored industry over agriculture in a country with a fundamental comparative advantage in agriculture. While the anti-export bias impeded productivity growth in agriculture, the import substitution strategy was not successful in promoting an efficient industrialization. In the end, Argentine growth never took-off.