Rents, Quasi-Rents, Normal Profits and Growth: Argentina and the Areas of Recent Settlement

Engineering Growth: Innovative Capacity and Development in the Americas

“…In Ecuador, Hurtado (2007) argues that the discovery of new mineral deposits was hindered by a resistance to scientific methods. More generally, Di Tella (1985) argues that Argentina proved unable to move beyond a state of exploiting the pure rents of a frontier or extraction of mineral riches, and beyond the "collusive rents" offered by state-sanctioned or otherwise imposed monopolies to tap the "unlimited source of growth" found in exploiting the quasi-rents of innovation, as the US, Canada and Australia were able to do.…”

Natural resources: neither curse nor destiny

“…have done (Baumol, Nelson, and Wolff 1994;Amsden and Hikino 1994). Or, to paraphrase Di Tella's (1985) broader historical view, the region proved unable to move beyond a state of exploiting the pure rents of a frontier or extraction of mineral riches, and beyond "collusive rents" offered by state-sanctioned or otherwise imposed monopoly, to tap the "unlimited source of growth" found in exploiting the quasirents of innovation. 9 This article argues that this failure has two central, although by no means exhaustive, explanations.…”

“…The barriers to trade and investment that comprised the inward-looking policies implemented after the Great Depression stand as the second impediment to the transition to an innovation-based economy and offer a rationale for the negative post-1950 Latin American dummy in the growth regressions. Di Tella's (1985) distinction between entrepreneurs being driven to appropriate the quasirents arising from innovations abroad versus exploitation of artificially contrived rents is not new. It does, however, highlight why the natural resources/manufacturing debate probably misses the point.…”

A Political Economy of International Migration, 1815‐1914*

“…Almost at the same time that the U.S. was increasingly pressing for restrictions on immigration, between 1885 and 1913, €11 million was spent on immigration subsidies by the Sgo Paolo and federal governments (Leff, 1982). Only in the 1880s did Argentine military and political organization become adequate to defeat the Indians and drive them off their land (di Tella, 1985). When that expropriation was releasing new land for commercial exploitation, Argentina even experimented with providing free passages to immigrants during the 1880s (Martinez and Lewandowski,191 1,.…”