El Instituto Argentino para el desarrollo Económico y Realidad Económica Defensa de un proyecto económico de liberación nacional antes del fin de la era industrial (1970-1976)

Abstract

The Argentine Institute for Economic Development is a significant and pioneering institution in the defense of national development in its various areas -economy, technology, industry, finance, etc.-. Since its beginnings in the 1960s, it has brought together a group of respected social scientists competent in various areas around an economic project of a national nature, of industrialist development and defender of small and medium-sized local industry. Its magazine Realidad Económica (RE) born at the beginning of the seventies, still valid, was both the instrument and the propitious space for the dissemination of the main debates and pronouncements of a political nature in various areas, but mainly the economy and national economic policy. The paper addresses the discussions around the economy and economic policy in its early years, capturing the voice and vision displayed after the anonymous reports of IADE in its official magazine RE. Considering that there was a constant proliferation of news reports and sectoral analyzes on the economy under the signature of IADE in all its issues, the study centered around its economic vision constitutes the main commitment to reveal the ideas, controversies and other issues that represented the institution in the previous critical years and development of the Third Peronism (1970-1973). Methodologically, the numbers produced between 1970-1976 were surveyed, paying special attention to the situation reports, political pronouncements and sectoral economic analyzes under the anonymous authorship of IADE, although including the studies that accompanied them in the RE pages. Among the main results, it was found that the IADE-RE showed significant concern about problems involving the economy such as the possibilities of sectoral development, the need to promote local firms over foreign ones, the excessive oligopolization of the sector industry, the high concentration of land in agricultural holdings, the need to protect small and medium-sized companies and articulate these slogans with an economic policy that prioritizes the increase in real wages, the internal market, the fluidity of local liquidity and the control of the external sector. In addition to building and articulating the economic vision of IADE, it is argued that all these debates that contributed to the local situation were also supported by fervent support for a national development project that materialized, starting in 1973, in the so-called Plan Triennial with the arrival of Peronism. In this way, the IADE fiercely defended said project, which understood that it had to undertake a structural transformation that would put an end to the foreignizing and oligopolistic model crystallized since the sixties, even with the hope that it would be reissued at the most critical moment of the Peronist government during the second half of 1975.