Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
effective area of control was a major feature of the nineteenth century. Formal
regional policy came much later, when from about 1960 there were a number of
effective policies in operation as part of national planning, with the stated
purpose of correcting the major imbalance between an overgrown centre and the
rest of the country. In Friedmann's (1966) scheme, the Buenos Aires conurbation
of around 10 million people could be regarded as the centre region combined
with the upward transitional region, and the rest was largely downward
transitional in nature, apart from the large southern zone of Patagonia which
might be regarded as the resource frontier, as it had a small population and
important resources such as hydroelectric power, sheep for wool production, and
fishing potential.
There was no peculiarly Argentine form of regional policy. In the early 1970s,
the problems of unbalanced growth were addressed partly through a growth
poles policy in the Third National Plan. But as this was never followed through
by later governments, only lasting for three years, it could not hope to have much
effect. The poles were set up in the far northwest, at Salta, and in the northeast at
Posadas but several were in the south in Patagonia, which focused the growth
poles on areas of national interest, for geopolitical reasons, but these were
scarcely areas of urgent regional problems (Morris 1972). Argentina has always
had worries over its effective domination of the national territory, and much
effort has gone into defending the southern frontiers against imaginary enemies.
Argentine claims to the whole of Patagonia are indeed somewhat dubious
(Escude 1987), and firm control over the area was desirable to assert ownership.
There have been other policies for industry, with a modest regional impact. Over
the years, policies of industrial promotion (Morris 1992a) were the main force in
redirecting economic efforts away from the capital city. From tentative
beginnings in 1956, with the lifting of export taxes for southern Patagonia, the
industrial promotion policy was extended and made more complex, with an array
of tax remissions and other financial instruments used to encourage investment.
Most of the interior provinces became claimants on the industrial promotion
programmes, with the strongest support for Tierra del Fuego, the Patagonian
provinces, and Tucuman in the north. As in Europe, the effects of such
programmes have been uncertain and never as strong as hoped for. It has been
shown (Schvartzer 1987) that the main impact towards decentralization of
industry away from Buenos Aires came, not from industrial promotion policy,
but simply from the recession in Argentina during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
With the opening of Argentina to trade, it was no longer necessary to have
industrial bases within the country, and the lack of confidence in governments at
the time meant a massive outsurge of investment from Buenos Aires to other
countries. In effect, this produced a decentralization of industry, since the special
aid given to some interior provinces meant that their industries were still worth
maintaining.
Those industries that survived in the interior only did so through subsidies, and
not based on a solid industrial infrastructure or efficient operations. In a country
