Argentina remains an attractive subject to historians and analysts who puzzle over how things went wrong economically, for the nation seems to have gone from rags to riches and back again to rags. Not long ago, the neoclassicists and structuralists commanded the debate, arguing over the long-term impact of exporting primary products. Now scholars are questioning the institutional legacies by which Argentina has grown into stagnation. Nobel Laureate Douglass C. North provides the point of departure with the New Institutional Economics (NIE). In 1997, some of the most prominent Latin Americanists attending the International Economic History Association meeting in Madrid devoted a plenary session to evaluating Latin American development according to the NIE. Others have put out a volume of essays on Mexico and Brazil with the purpose of ascertaining How Latin America Fell Behind, a reference to North’s comparison between England’s institutional arrangements that promoted economic growth in...

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