The Fiscal Crisis of the Argentine State

Abstract

In the early years of the twentieth century, the idea that Buenos Aires was the capital of an underdeveloped nation would have seemed ludicrous to both visitors and residents of that vital, cultured, and prosperous city. Sixty years later, Argentina's economic structure and internal market integration as well as the relatively high levels of personal income, urbanization, education, health, and cultural homogeneity of its population make Argentina more similar to North American and Western European nations than to the poorer nations of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Nevertheless, the claim by W. W. Rostow (1960: xii) that Argentina's take off occurred between the late 1930s and early 1950s is clearly not warranted in his teleological view of such matters, and Argentina's post-Second World War record of erratic economic growth and political instability resembles that of an underdeveloped nation. In this short paper, we propose a new way of looking at the general character of Argentine economic policy during the 1946-1955 Presidency of Juan Per6n and of understanding how significantly different were the policy strategies pursued by subsequent governments. In this effort, we apply a set of analytical categories drawn from James O'Connor's The Fiscal Crisis of the State (1973), arguing that although O'Connor's analysis was of the United States, his theoretical model is appropriate for the advanced social formation of Argentina and is capable of generating new and substantial insights into the political and economic processes of post-Second World War Argentina. In choosing appropriate categories of analysis, social scientists are performing an operation analogous to a statistician's use of analysis of variance: they try to construct a typology in which interactions within each category are considerably less interesting than the interactions among categories. Each set of social categories, then, embodies a definite conception of causation. Class analysis, dependency theory, and sectoral clash models, for instance, each propose a particular manner in which complex political and economic processes can be divided up in order to isolate and focus on what are perceived to be the central variables and relationships. The complexity of the material and the overlapping as well as ideological character of social theories work against applying clear and objective standards for theory selection, so the terms of *Julia Coan Allen is a consultant to governmental agencies on renewable resources policy while pursuing her graduate education at Johns Hopkins University. Frederick Stirton Weaver is Dean of the School of Social Science and teaches economics and history at Hampshire College.