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Lies, Damn Lies, and Argentine GDP

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

Laura Randall
Laura Randall*
Affiliation:
Hunter College, CUNY
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“Statistics are the poetry of Latin America” was Frank Tannenbaum's discreet version of “there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” This is a widespread enough view, even now, when numbers are fashionable, and a fair number of my colleagues suggest any series will do to illustrate their well-conceived articles. A few skeptics refuse to go in for misplaced fashion. A Mexican economist, working in the statistics in the boondocks, said he was told to apply a correction coefficient to his numbers, to make them consistent with his boss's earlier reports. He quit, and became an essayist. An Argentine economist said that when his division head wanted to show growth, the investigators were sent to big firms; slumps were reported by surveying the output of small firms.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , 1976 , pp. 137 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by the University of Texas Press

References

Notes

1. Hugh H. Schwartz, “The Argentine Experience with Industrial Credit and Protection Incentives, 1943-1958” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1967), vol. 1, p. 135. Schwartz adds that “it would be interesting to see what growth rates would be implied by the use of 1946 weights. At that time prices were not quite as distorted from ‘normal’ as in the wartime year of 1943, nor did they yet have the, I believe, even greater price distortions of the Argentina of 1950.” Schwartz prefers the 1943 weights until the late 1950s, but prefers the 1960 base for the period beginning 1957-58 (Schwartz to Randall, 12 March 1975).

2. Schwartz, “The Argentine Experience,” p. 132.

3. Ibid., app. M.

4. Ibid., p. 133. Note that the Schwartz indices for the years after 1953 linked together indices with different weighting systems. The analysis holds, despite this, as Schwartz's 1943 base would tend to understate industrial growth by the mid-1950s.

5. Victor Jorge Elias, “Estimates of Value Added, Capital and Labor in Argentine Manufacturing, 1935-1963” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1969), pp. 8-10.

6. Elias, “Estimates of Value Added.”

7. Laura Randall, An Economic History of Argentina in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming).

8. On a related point, see Daniel Schydlowsky, “International Trade Policy in the Economic Growth of Latin America,” in Trade and Investment Policies in the Americas, ed. Stephen E. Guisinger (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1973). Schwartz believes that his findings have stronger implications for the responsiveness of Argentine industrialists to financial incentives than for the efficiency of Argentine industrial growth, which he believes “was quite uneven, with some very bright spots and some very bad areas” (Schwartz to Randall, 12 March 1975). For an evaluation of industrialization policies according to presidential period, utilizing the data presented in this article, see Randall, An Economic History of Argentina.

9. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Leader and Vanguard in Mass Society: A Study of Peronist Argentina (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971).