Export-led Boom
"In spite of its enormous advance which the Republic has made within the last ten years, the most cautious critic would not hesitate to aver that Argentina has but just entered upon the threshold of her greatness."
Percy F. Martin, Through Five Republics of South America, 1905.Argentina, which had been insignificant during the first half of the 19th century, showed growth from the 1860s up until 1930 that was so impressive that it was expected to eventually become the United States of South America. This impressive and sustained economic performance was driven by the export of agricultural goods.
During the second half of the 19th century, there was an intense process of colonization of the territory in the form of latifundia. Until 1875 wheat was imported as it was not grown in sufficient quantities to supply local demand; by 1903 the country supplied all its own needs and exported 75,270,503 imperial bushels (2,737,491.8 m3) of wheat, enough to sustain 16,000,000 people.
In the 1870s real wages in Argentina were around 76% relative to Britain, rising to 96% in the first decade of the 20th century. GDP per capita rose from 35% of the United States average in 1880 to about 80% in 1905, similar to that of France, Germany and Canada.
Read more about this topic: Economic History Of Argentina
Famous quotes containing the word boom:
“California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)