The firm in early Argentine industrialization, 1890--1930: A study of fifty-five joint-stock companies' owners, finance sources, productivity, and profits

The scholarly literature of Argentina's economic history has observed that the unfulfilled promise of Argentine industrialization can be attributed to its high levels of industrial concentration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine this hypothesis at the micro-economic level through analyses of fifty-five leading Argentine manufacturing firms during the formative period of Argentina's economic development from 1890 to 1930. Argentina had a noncompetitive and underdeveloped industrial structure because it came to be dominated by a handful of large firms owned by merchant finance groups. These groups were networks of financiers with the capital to afford the high costs of modern, large-scale manufacturing in Argentina. They were partly responsible for industrial concentration. These groups' companies survived Argentina's volatile and unpredictable business cycles between 1890 and 1930 because they used strategies to control market outcomes so as to outlive competitors. By 1930, these owners effectively consolidated investment capital, manufacturing assets, and successfully increased their market power.; I support this thesis through the analyses of firm-level data. I examine fifty-five companies with respect to their origins, market shares, owners, finance sources, survival strategies, profitability, debt to equity ratios, and output from 1890 to 1930. The analyses in this dissertation draw on three newly created and original data sets. The first and largest data set was profit and debt-to-equity ratios created from 756 balance sheets and income statements from 1890 to 1930. The second data set comes from the manuscript census of 1895. This source provided firm-level information for 1,002 manufacturing establishments in eleven manufacturing activities in Argentina. I relied on the manuscript census of 1895 for the estimations of concentration and total factor productivity (TFP). The third data set was a compilation of biographical and business information on the 1,272 directors and shareholders that owned the fifty-five companies under study between 1890 and 1930.