Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
of its small domestic markets. Production for domestic markets or for the Latin
market was always under protection.
Another argument concerns the role of the large territory and resources. On
the one hand, in Argentina itself there is the claim that the country is
overcentralized. Some aspects of the overcentralization may be measured by the
extra-high costs of public services in Buenos Aires, or pollution and congestion
costs. But these costs may well be balanced by the great economies of scale,
whereby larger scale operations can be undertaken in the country's largest and
richest market region. There are also external economies through each firm being
set amongst neighbours that can supply services or components to it.
Concentration of effort is beneficial, as we shall see in reference to the NICS,
and as was the case in nineteenth century industrial districts. On the other hand, a
reverse argument may be made. This is that the country's huge interior regions,
and its resources, have encouraged the wrong kind of industries and set the
country on paths it could not sustain, through encouraging development of the
interior. This kind of argument may be valid for countries such as Venezuela,
which have had oil wealth that they have not been able to manage successfully,
which has caused a lack of competitiveness in other national industries. In the
case of Argentina, no single resource, or group of resources, has had this effect,
but the argument, following the discussion above, does hold some value. A
variety of concerns for the interior have distorted national efforts away from the
most efficient course. In the long term, this may not even be an equitable course,
if national wealth does not allow for redistribution to poorer regions.
A third set of arguments concerns the political and social structure of the
country. This country is a newly formed one which has had to struggle to achieve
national stability, and whose centre has sought power and control over the
territory. An aristocratic and often military-linked government has been ready to
intervene constantly in the economy over the past 50 years. Intervention has been
towards self-sufficiency, more than an isi policy, seeking to ensure the country's
capacity to provide for itself in all respects, including military defence through
strategic supplies. There are territorial aspects of this policy, including the need
to achieve regional development, to integrate regions into the centre, and to
ensure they are not open to aggression from neighbours. Geopolitics here
combines with economic considerations. As Street (1995) has amply
documented, from the 1940s to the 1980s, continuous intervention by military or
dictatorial governments served to limit academic freedom in universities which
have produced a number of Nobel Prize winners, and has delayed technological
innovation and economic development through its disruption of a stable learning
society. There are “rents” obtained by this kind of intervention, in the
maintenance of wealth among landed proprietors, of power in the nexus between
these proprietors and the military, which have acted against the creation of an
open economy and society. Such features contrast with the democratic origins of
some other LDCS.
