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Aráoz, María Florencia
Nicolini, Esteban A.
and
Talassino, Mauricio
2020.
Time and Space.
p.
65.
Article contents
Regional Growth and the Persistence of Regional Income Inequality in Argentina in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 February 2020
Abstract
Southern and central regions of Argentina moved from being relatively poor in the sixteenth century to being the richest in the country today. Although there is some evidence of this reversal, the process of regional growth in Argentina in the first half of the twentieth century is, in the main, unknown. In this paper, we present an estimation of the GDPs of Argentina's 25 provinces in 1914: this is the first consistent estimation of this variable for any period before the 1950s. Our results confirm that in 1914 the city of Buenos Aires and some districts in Patagonia had the highest per capita GDP, and a comparison with the available data for 1953 shows strong persistence in incomes per capita in this period; sectoral analysis of provincial GDPs suggests that growth in the leading districts was driven by economies of agglomeration in some cases and land abundance in others.
Spanish abstract
Las regiones del sur y del centro de Argentina pasaron de ser relativamente pobres en el siglo XVI a ser de las más ricas del país hoy en día. Aunque hay alguna evidencia empírica de este cambio, el proceso del crecimiento regional en Argentina en la primera mitad del siglo XX es prácticamente desconocido. En este artículo, presentamos un cálculo del PIB de las 25 provincias en Argentina en 1914 que representa la primera estimación consistente de esta variable para cualquier periodo antes de los años 1950s. Nuestros resultados confirman que en 1914 la ciudad de Buenos Aires y algunos distritos en la Patagonia tenían los mayores PIB per cápita y una comparación con los datos disponibles para 1953 muestra una fuerte persistencia en los ingresos per cápita durante ese periodo; análisis sectoriales del PIB provincial sugieren que el crecimiento de los distritos principales fue resultado de economías de aglomeración en algunos casos y de abundancia de tierra en otros.
Portuguese abstract
As regiões centrais e do sul da Argentina transformaram-se de relativamente pobres no século dezesseis às mais ricas do país atualmente. Embora haja alguma evidência empírica desta mudança, o processo de crescimento regional na Argentina na primeira metade do século vinte é quase desconhecido. Neste ensaio apresentamos um cáculo do PIB de vinte e cinco províncias na Argentina em 1914, que é a primeira estimativa consistente desta variável em qualquer período antes de 1950. Nossos resultados confirmam que em 1914 a cidade de Buenos Aires e alguns distritos na Patagônia apresentavam o PIB per capita mais alto e uma comparação com dados disponíveis de 1953 demonstram forte persistência em ganhos per capita nesse período; análises setoriais do PIB das províncias sugerem que o crescimento do distritos líderes foi impulsionada pela economia de aglomeração em alguns casos e pela abundância de terra e outros.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020
Footnotes
For comments and previous discussions on the topic the authors thank Marc Badía, María Florencia Correa-Deza, Alfonso Herranz, Mauricio Talassino and Henry Willebald. They are also grateful for comments received at the Cuarto Congreso Latinoamericano de Historia Económica in Bogotá (2014) and for seminars at the Universidad de la República (Montevideo) and the Universidad de Barcelona. Esteban Nicolini acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through Project ECO2011-25713 and from the Consejo de Investigaciones de la Universidad Nacional de Tucumán through Subsidy 26/F410. María Florencia Aráoz acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministry of the Economy through Project ECO2012-39169-C03-03. Both authors thank the Universidad del Norte Santo Tomás de Aquino (for continuous financial support) and the Argentine Ministry of Science and Technology (for financial support) through PICT 2429-2013.
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28 The methodology is specific to each sector and – in many situations – to different parts of each sector. The description of the methodology and sources for these estimations encompasses 80 pages (CFI–ITT, Relevamiento de la estructura regional, Vol. 2, pp. 247–327).
29 The CFI–ITT's equivalent to Argentine provincial GDP is called the ‘Producto Bruto Geográfico’ (Gross Geographical Product, PBG). The main difference between GDP and PBG is the unit of observation for measuring economic activity. In Argentine official statistics, when economic activity is measured for a sub-national unit, the value added is directly assigned to the productive unit according its geographic location. In this article we will use the English acronym GDP, following Joan Ramón Rosés et al. in respect of Spanish regions: Rosés, Joan Ramón, Martínez-Galarraga, Julio and Tirado, Daniel A., ‘The Upswing of Regional Income Inequality in Spain (1860–1930)’, Explorations in Economic History, 47 (2010), pp. 244–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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35 From data included in TCN, Vol. 2: Población (Population), we produced the figures for total population and occupational categories. From Vol. 5: Explotaciones agropecuarias (Agro-Pastoral Establishments), we obtained information on land used for agriculture and cattle production. From Vol. 6: Censo ganadero (Livestock Census), we obtained information on livestock and the value of land used for agriculture and cattle production. All the information related to industry and trade and services was obtained from Vol. 7: Censo de las industrias (Industry Census) and Vol. 8: Censo del comercio. Fortuna nacional. Diversas estadísticas (Census of Commerce. National Wealth. Various Statistics). Vols. 9 and 10: Instrucción pública. Bienes del estado (Public Instruction. State Property) and Valores mobiliarios y Estadísticas diversas (Transferable Securities and Miscellaneous Statistics), provided information on public utilities, ports and hospitals, among others.
36 Alejandro Bunge was an economist with a vast working experience in the Labour Department and the Nacional Statistics Office, academic activities in the universities of La Plata and Buenos Aires, and a deep knowledge of the functioning of the Argentine economy. See Bunge, Alejandro E., Riqueza y renta de la Argentina. Su distribución y su capacidad contributiva (Buenos Aires: Agencia General, 1917)Google Scholar.
37 See note 39.
38 In their description of this category, the commentators on the census claimed that it included those individuals ‘… who in each province were without a known occupation, profession or means of livelihood at the time of the census’: TCN, Vol. 1, p. 258. Translations from TCN are by the authors.
39 Departamento Nacional del Trabajo (DNT), Boletín del Departamento Nacional del Trabajo no. 25 (Buenos Aires: DNT, 1913), pp. 1084–93.
40 DNT, Anuario Estadístico del Trabajo (Buenos Aires: Talleres Gráficos A. de Martino, 1916), pp. 111–65.
41 DNT, Boletín (1913), p. 1094.
42 The Territorio de Los Andes was located in the west of the provinces of Salta, Catamarca and Jujuy, in the Puna area. This is very arid land and most of its economic activity was based on primary low-productivity activities.
43 DNT, Boletín del Departamento Nacional del Trabajo, no. 3 (Buenos Aires: DNT, 1907), p. 369Google Scholar.
44 According to DNT, Boletín (1907), pp. 360–9, which reported on wages in several provinces in 1907.
45 The determination of the required skill was based on the definitions of the tasks involved in each plus contemporary descriptions of the kind of jobs, plus (and mainly) common sense. The list of the 436 categories and their assumed respective level of required skill is available from the authors upon request.
46 The value added of the government sector was calculated, as is usual, from the sum of the wages of all public servants.
47 TCN, Vol. 7.
48 Ibid., p. 48.
49 If the declared capital was 70 per cent of the actual capital, we need to multiply by 1/(0.7) to arrive at the actual capital. We followed two strategies to check if this multiplier was reasonable. The first was to look for an alternative source to confirm the level of under-registration mentioned by the census officials. Analysis by an expert on historical Argentine GDP (Coria, ‘El PBG de Mendoza para 1914’) suggests that a rough but reasonable approximation of the magnitude of under-registration in the industrial sector is given by the difference between the number of workers declared by the owners of the firms in each economic sector or sub-sector (TCN, Vol. 7) and the number of individuals declared to be working in that particular sector or sub-sector (from the household survey, TCN, Vol. 4, Población). Following these criteria, we confirmed significant levels of under-registration (49 per cent) in the industrial sector. The second strategy was to simulate alternative estimations with different levels of under-registration (from 0 to 49 per cent): these confirmed that none of the qualitative results in this paper was affected.
50 This was not building activity per se but the sale of inputs and raw materials for the building process.
51 If the declared capital was 50 per cent of the actual capital, the multiplier required to arrive at the actual capital is 1/(0.5). To check the multiplier in the services sector we followed a similar strategy to that for industrial capital (see note 49); the level of under-registration that emerged from the differences in number of workers in services was 53 per cent. Again, alternative simulations in which we increased capital in services from 0 to 100 per cent did not change the relative positions of the provinces’ incomes (the results of the simulations are available on request).
52 TCN, Vol. 8, p. 133.
53 Railways: Ministerio de Obras Públicas, Estadística de los ferrocarriles en explotación, Vol. 22: Año 1913 (Buenos Aires: Talleres Gráficos del Ministerio de Obras Públicas, 1916); public utilities: TCN, Vol. 9, p. 461; tramways: TCN, Vol. 10, pp. 429–30; ports: TCN, Vol. 9, p. 453; printing: TCN, Vol. 9, p. 277; hospitals: TCN, Vol.10, pp. 517–20.
54 ‘Consideraciones sobre los resultados del censo ganadero’, TCN, Vol. 6, p. xlii. The rather conservative underlying assumption here is that entrepreneurs invested in activities whose profitability was at least as high as the alternative provided by the financial system. The resulting figure (around 7 per cent; methodology for obtaining that 7 per cent is available upon request) is consistent with the rate of return on investment in industrial capital and services that can be obtained following the empirical analysis by Pineda, Yovanna, ‘Manufacturing Profits and Strategies in Argentine Industrial Development, 1904–1930’, Business History, 49: 2 (2007), pp. 186–210CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
55 Land used: TCN, Vol. 5, p. 683; rents: TCN, Vol. 5, pp. 752ff.
56 Bunge, Riqueza y renta, p. 74.
57 TCN, Vol. 5, pp. 585–91 provides tables of the value of agricultural machinery and implements per province that gives the same numbers as TCN, Vol. 6, p. xlvi (table with values for agriculture and livestock production combined).
58 Bunge, Riqueza y renta, p. 47.
59 TCN, Vol. 6, p. 17.
60 This is particularly true in the case of peones and jornaleros.
61 Bunge, Riqueza y renta, p. 74.
62 TCN, Vol. 6, p. 3.
63 The equivalent coefficients are provided by Danilo Astori in respect of Uruguay in the central decades of the twentieth century; they indicate the quantity of land required to raise a unit of each kind of livestock. Astori, Danilo, La evolución tecnológica de la ganadería uruguaya 1930–1977 (Montevideo: Banda Oriental, 1979)Google Scholar.
64 Bunge, Riqueza y renta, p. 74. This rate of return is different from that assumed for capital in the secondary and tertiary sectors (8 per cent). Given that the assumptions arise from Bunge's expert assessment in these sectors, we preferred to stick to his opinion. If we reduce the rate of return in the secondary and tertiary sectors to 4 per cent, the levels of GDP in each province diminish slightly but the relative positions of the provinces remain basically the same.
65 Cortés Conde, ‘Estimaciones del Producto Bruto Interno’, p. 20.
66 If labour income were imputed to the individuals classified as entrepreneurs following the criteria defined in the section ‘Labour Remuneration’ (above), the national average GDP would be AR$616.
67 Cortés Conde, ‘Estimaciones del Producto Bruto Interno’, p. 17.
68 These figures are the authors’ results based on the data used for calculating the GDPs.
69 Livestock production, mainly sheep raising, started in Patagonia before the region was incorporated into the national economy in 1884 (Law no. 1532; see note 6). The most common form of productive organisation was large latifundia devoted to sheep raising, with very low population and labour inputs and small and scattered urban centres. See Míguez, ‘La gran expansión agraria’; Bandieri, Susana, ‘La Patagonia: Mitos y realidades de un espacio social heterogéneo’, in Gelman, Jorge (ed.), La historia económica argentina en la encrucijada: Balances y perspectivas (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2006), pp. 389–410Google Scholar; Soriano, Alberto and Paruelo, José M., ‘El pastoreo ovino’, Revista Ciencia Hoy, 2: 7 (1989), pp. 44–53Google Scholar.
70 CFI–ITT, Relevamiento de la estructura regional, Vol. 2, p. 159 (population) and p. 205 (GDP).
71 Given these econometric outcomes, it is not surprising that the standard statistic tests of beta-convergence fail to find any significant evidence that the poorer provinces in 1914 grew faster in the period 1914–53 than the richer ones. See Barro, R. and Sala-i-Martin, X., ‘Convergence’, Journal of Political Economy, 100: 2 (1992), pp. 223–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
72 Cf. Maloney and Valencia Caicedo, ‘The Persistence of (Subnational) Fortune’, p. 2387.
73 We placed trade, transportation and communications, electricity, gas and water, finance, housing, government, and other services in the tertiary sector for 1953: CFI–ITT, Relevamiento de la estructura regional, Vol. 2, p. 205.
74 The CFI's estimate (Ibid.) distinguished the GDP of the province of Buenos Aires in the ‘Partidos Conurbanos’ (i.e. the administrative units bordering on the Capital Federal) from that in the ‘Partidos Restantes’ (i.e. the remaining administrative units of the province, more distant from the Capital Federal).
75 CFI –ITT, Relevamiento de la estructura regional, Vol. 2, p. 205.
76 Ibid.
77 ‘The Persistence of (Subnational) Fortune’.
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