Democracy, Distributional Conflicts and Macroeconomic Policymaking in Argentina, 1983-89

Abstract

In December 1983, when Raúl Alfonsín and his Radical party assumed responsibility for Argentina's transition from authoritarian dictatorship to democracy, the economy was mired in deep crisis. Rather than a repetition of the familiar “stop-go” cycles of previous decades, the mid-1980s crisis was more structural in nature, stemming from a perverse logic deeply rooted in contemporary Argentine capitalism. Few Argentines, regardless of ideological persuasion, doubted that major reforms were imperative if the country's post-1930 model of import-substitution industrialization was to avoid total collapse. For Argentina's fledgling democracy, the task at hand could not have been more daunting — to reverse what Alfonsín himself had referred to as “50 years of decadence.”