Industrial Development in a Frontier Economy: The Industrialization of Argentina, 1890-1930

摘要

Studies of industrialisation in Latin America have undergone significant changes since the 1970s. In broad terms there has been a shift from an interpretation that saw industrial development as being galvanised by the external shock of the Great Depression in the 1930s to an alternative viewpoint that stresses that, at least in the leading Latin American economies, industrialisation got under way in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, coinciding with a period of export-led growth. Although a series of studies produced in Argentina in the 1970s spearheaded the revision of traditional interpretations of the roots of industrialisation in Latin America, until recently there had been a dearth of general studies of industrialisation prior to 1930 in the country itself, in contrast to the cases of Mexico and Brazil. The publication of Fernando Rocchi's Chimneys in the Desert: Industrialization in Argentina during the Export Boom Years, 1870-1930 (Stanford University Press, 2006) represented a giant step forward, offering for the first time the results of exhaustive and original research on the process.