Balance-of-Payments Constraints as the Key to Dependency: The Case of Argentina

• Author: Andrés Wainer,Paula Belloni
• Date: 01 March 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211069556
• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X211069556

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 243, Vol. 49 No. 2, March 2022, 144–162

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211069556

© 2022 Latin American Perspectives

144

Balance-of-Payments Constraints as the Key

to Dependency

The Case of Argentina

by

Andrés Wainer and Paula Belloni

Translated by

Mariana Ortega-Breña

Considering the constraints to growth derived from the balance of payments and the

external sector as the area in which the dependency of Latin American countries is most

clearly expressed, application of the contributions of dependency theorists concerning

external restrictions to growth in Argentina shows that the fate of surplus value in this

economy is a key factor in the explanation of its dependent nature.

Considerando las restricciones al crecimiento derivadas del balance de pagos y el sector

externo como el ámbito donde se expresa más nítidamente la relación de dependencia, la

aplicación de los aportes de la teoría de la dependencia referentes al problema de la restric-

ción externa al crecimiento en la Argentina muestra que el destino que se le da al plusvalor

en esta economía es un elemento clave para explicar su situación de dependencia.

Keywords: Dependency, Underdevelopment, Balance-of-payments-constrained growth,

Deindustrialization, Argentina

With the consolidation of their national states in the nineteenth century,

Latin American countries sealed their integration into the world market by

becoming subordinate to the dynamics of industrialized countries via the pro-

vision of food and raw materials. The industrialization that emerged from the

crisis of the 1930s and World War II rearticulated these bonds, and, while Latin

American nations mostly maintained their role as exporters of primary prod-

ucts and derived manufactures, the greater complexity of the productive struc-

ture fueled new import needs that resulted in recurrent foreign currency

shortages and hindered the development of the forces of production. This pro-

cess was addressed by dependency theories, a wave of Latin American research

that encompassed a relatively heterogeneous set of participants and led to

intense debates with important contributions to the social sciences. Probably

Andrés Wainer is a senior researcher at Argentina’s Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones

Científicas y Tecnológicas and assistant professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, the

Universidad Nacional de San Martín, and the Facultad Latinamericana de Ciencias Sociales

(FLACSO-Argentina). Paula Belloni is a researcher and professor at the Universidad Nacional de

La Plata and a Ph.D. candidate in social sciences at FLACSO- Argentina. Mariana Ortega-Breña is

a freelance translator based in Mexico City.

1069556LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X211069556Latin American PerspectivesWainer and Belloni/Balance-of-Payments Constraints and Dependency

research-article2022

Wainer and Belloni/BALANCE-OF-PAYMENTS CONSTRAINTS AND DEPENDENCY 145

the only common ground among these scholars was the general assessment of

the relative backwardness of Latin American countries as a typical by-product

of global capitalist development, which presents different variants according

to the particular historical conditions (economic, social, and ideological) of

each social formation.

During the last quarter of the twentieth century, many of the dependentist

ideas were overshadowed by neoliberal approaches arguing that removing

trade, production, and financial barriers would allow for a more efficient and

“impersonal” allocation of resources across markets. Thus, the productivity

levels of “underdeveloped” countries, by specializing in activities with com-

parative advantages, would rapidly converge toward those of “developed”

countries. After more than four decades it is possible to assert that these prom-

ises have not been fulfilled in Latin America. Latin American countries that

followed the neoliberal recipe did not overcome their status as underdevel-

oped, and many have even deepened their dependency. This includes

Argentina, which not only did not improve its productive capacity but, follow-

ing the neoliberal reforms initiated by the last civil-military dictatorship (1976–

1983) and deepened during the 1990s, reversed much of the progress made

during the previous stage of import-substitution industrialization.

Although at the beginning of the twenty-first century the Argentine govern-

ment deployed some political initiatives that tried to counter this path, these

did not substantively upset class relations or the composition of the dominant

bloc and thus failed to overcome the contradictions inherent in a peripheral and

dependent economy. In this context, the purpose of our paper is to determine

whether so-called external constraints to growth remain the most visible expres-

sion of the dependency relationship. The main hypothesis is that neoliberal

reforms sharpened the dependent character of the Argentine economy. External

constraints seem to remain this dependency’s main expression, but the way they

operate has been altered by local and global changes in capitalism and the hege-

monic consolidation of financial capital. While many of the neodevelopmental-

ist policies adopted under Kirchnerism (2003–2015) sought to increase national

autonomy, the limits of this national-bourgeois project are highlighted by its

failure to change the structural conditions that recreate dependency . The reaf-

firmation of neoliberal policies with the government of Mauricio Macri (2015–

2019) served only to bury any trace of autonomy, once again subjecting local

economic policy to the dictates of international financial capital.

EXTERNAL CONSTRAINTS AS AN EXPRESSION OF

UNDERDEVELOPMENT AND DEPENDENCY

Dependency theories arose in opposition to the structuralist thinking ema-

nating mainly from the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC). In

opposition to the view of development held by Latin American structuralism,

dependency theory considered dependency due not to a lack of capitalist

development but to the articulation of underdeveloped countries as such (and

the existing social groups within them), along with the industrial powers,

within the framework of the world capitalist system. Therefore, for most