Argentina-Canada from 1870: Explaining the dynamics of divergence

Germán Héctor González () and Valentina Viego

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Argentina and Canada started their industrialization processes while exporting natural resources and importing capital goods. These two nations were sparsely populated but received significant inflows of European immigrants since the second half of the nineteenth century. Until the start of World War II, both economies experienced similar per-capita GDPs. However, the gap between both per-capita GDPs began to grow, widening throughout the century. We carry out an empirical study of the deep determinants of the divergence process between both economies. We confirm that while Canada was drawn into a successful path due to the adjacency with a bigger and complementary economy, Argentina fell into a “staple trap”.

Keywords: Relative per-capita GDPs; development accounting; total factor productivity; Argentina; Canada (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O11 N16 N12 O57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
Date: 2009-06
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/18394/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:18394

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany
Address: Schackstr. 4, D-80539 Munich, Germany
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Ekkehart Schlicht ().