ABSTRACT
The historical evolution of the Argentine economy has often been viewed as a puzzling transition from a state of prosperity and successful integration in the international division of labor to one marked by comparatively low growth and strong macroeconomic instability. That picture has certainly more than a grain of validity. However, the Argentine performance poses nontrivial analytical questions about its determinants, and about the existence and features of potential counterfactuals of paths that “could have been taken but were not”. All economies undergo changes through the interplay of their productive and social configuration, their varying institutions and policies, and the behaviors that determine the observed performance, given the opportunities and restrictions generated by the rest of the world. In this chapter, we try to highlight what we consider salient traits of those interactions in the last six decades, in order to sketch an analysis of the decision processes and economic mechanisms that defined the Argentine experience, and briefly consider issues and prospects.
