Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
11.8 million, live in metropolitan Buenos Aires, and this one city houses 41 per
cent of the national urban population. Population growth is slow, at 1.4 per cent
annually, and getting slower. Urban population is increasing while the rural
population is decreasing, in relative and in absolute terms.
It is worth prefacing the description of economic development with an account
of the growth of the nation. At the time of independence from Spain in 1825
this was not a nation, but a collection of loosely linked settlements, indicated by
the first post-independence name given to it, the Confederation of the River
Plate. This had jurisdiction over a very limited area around Buenos Aires and up
the river Parana. Beyond this, territory had to be won by conquering regional
lords in the interior provinces, or by pushing back the Indian frontier. Both of
these were accomplished in the nineteenth century, and the nation was formed.
Throughout, the state intervened and promoted the developments that took place,
incorporating new territories as a positive policy. A strong geopolitical stance
was taken to defend this territory and assert its Argentine status (Morris 1996a).
Final territorial advances were made in the 1880s, in Patagonia, and the 1890s, in
the Chaco, to claim the two extremes, north and south, for the nation.
Developmental policies since that time have increasingly sought to maintain
territorial control as well as achieve economic growth in the regions. The central
point of this history, from the stance of the present discussion of development, is
that the state intervened from the beginning, that the state existed before the
nation, and that only gradually did a sense of nationhood and civil society
organizations to match come into existence. There is thus no question of whether
the state can be held responsible for development over space. It was active from
the outset, and this may be found to be the case in most of the Latin American
countries, as in many of the LDCS (Morris 1996a).
At a national level, this country's economic development was spectacular up
to the Peron period of the 1950s. From a backward colony of the South American
empire of Spain, it became, in the course of the nineteenth century, a major
exporter of raw materials to Europe, starting in the 1830s with wool, hides and
salt meat, and adding to these frozen meat, wheat and other grains. On the basis
of the new wealth, and with the cultural import of Spanish and Italian
immigrants in the latter part of the century, Argentina also achieved a good level
of general education and a reasonable provision of welfare services.
Spatially, the country's economy and society concentrated heavily around the
capital city, where the main port was created and where the railway system had
its hub. Buenos Aires was the main port both for exports and for the import trade
into the country. Highly centralized government gave further impetus to this
concentration at Buenos Aires. Economic development was eventually checked
from the time of the Peron period, 1945-55, by an abrupt forcing of industrial
development in a project of national autarchy like that of Spain. Manufacturing
was developed, but at the cost of overburdening agriculture and checking its
development. Argentina had already begun to develop substitutes for its
industrial imports in the 1930s, when the northern hemisphere was unable to
