Banking and finance in Argentina in the period 1900-35

From 1900 to 1935, Argentina evolved from an economy highly dependent on external, primarily British, finance to one more nearly self-sufficient. We examine the failure of domestic finance to adequately fill the void left by the decline of London and the breakdown of the world financial system in the interwar period, when neither the Buenos Aires Bolsa nor the private domestic banks developed rapidly enough to fully replace British investors as efficient channels for financing private investment. One consequence is that Argentine investable funds were increasingly concentrated in a single institution, the Banco de la Nacion Argentina (BNA), creating a lopsided financial structure that was vulnerable to rent seeking and to authoritarian capture. Nevertheless, several measures, including gold reserves, interest rates, money supply, bank credit, and the market capitalization of domestic corporations, attest to the very high level of financial development achieved by Argentina. ; Economic Research Working Paper 0108Financial crises - Latin America

Banking and finance in Argentina in the period 1900-35

From 1900 to 1935, Argentina evolved from an economy highly dependent on external, primarily British, finance to one more nearly self-sufficient. The authors examine the failure of domestic finance to adequately fill the void left by the decline of London and the breakdown of the world financial system in the interwar period, when neither the Buenos Aires Bolsa nor the private domestic banks developed rapidly enough to fully replace British investors as efficient channels for financing private investment. One consequence is that Argentine investable funds were increasingly concentrated in a single institution, the Banco de la Nacion Argentina (BNA), creating a lopsided financial structure that was vulnerable to rent seeking and to authoritarian capture. Nevertheless, several measures, including gold reserves, interest rates, money supply, bank credit, and the market capitalization of domestic corporations, attest to the very high level of financial development achieved by Argentina.Banks and banking - Argentina

Argentina's lost decade and subsequent recovery: hits and misses of the neoclassical growth model

We examine the economic depression that Argentina suffered in the 1980s, as well as the subsequent recovery, from the perspective of growth theory, taking total factor productivity as exogenous. The predictions of the neoclassical growth model conform rather well with the evidence for the "lost decade" depression and at the same time point to a puzzle: Investment did not recover in the subsequent decade of the 1990s nearly as fast as it should have according to that same model.Depressions

Economic growth in Argentina in the period 1900-30: some evidence from stock returns

This paper reports the first stage of a project to recover Argentine stock market data for the entire 20th century. The authors find that real rates of return on Argentine stocks and bonds after 1920 were above those in the Belle Époque, and that they were consistent with the view that in the postwar period Argentina remained firmly integrated with international financial markets.Argentina

Argentina's capital gap puzzle

Argentina’s GDP per working age person in 2003 was about the same as it was twenty years earlier and around fifteen percent below trend. By international standards that has been a dismal performance whose ultimate sources are important to uncover to eventually reverse that country’s seemingly secular decline. The purpose of this paper is precisely to take a first step towards that understanding. To that effect, we examine Argentina’s recent growth experience, which includes two deep recessions and a recovery, with the lens of a neoclassical growth model that takes total factor productivity as exogenous.Argentina

Dollarization and monetary unions: implementation guidelines

Economic Research Working Paper 0105