Uruguay: The Rise of a Monocentric Economy

Emiliano Travieso () and Alfonso Herranz-Loncán
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Emiliano Travieso: Carlos III University of Madrid

A chapter in Roots of Underdevelopment, 2023, pp 433-462 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract We explore the impacts of urban primacy on Uruguayan economic development, with a focus on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. We argue that Montevideo’s primacy produced a dualistic economic geography (city-port/countryside) without intermediate towns of an even remotely comparable scale. The lack of a network of cities translated into physical infrastructure, notably through a dendritic railway design where would-be secondary towns were not connected to each other. Primacy became an obstacle to the development of a more diversified territorial division of labor and limited the emergence of new clusters, especially in sectors associated with industrialization. Such a monocentric economy was ill-suited for structural change, contributing to Uruguay’s mediocre twentieth-century growth record and its continued divergence from the world’s leading economies.

Keywords: Uruguay; Urban primacy; Transport; Structural change; Economic geography (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-38723-4_15

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-38723-4_15

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