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The Great Leap Forward and WWII are absolutely comparable. China had been fighting colonial domination (first European, then Japanese) for almost 50 years by th
by beat 8y ago
The Great Leap Forward and WWII are absolutely comparable. China had been fighting colonial domination (first European, then Japanese) for almost 50 years by the time WWII (and Japanese occupation) ended. This was followed by several years of civil war that finally ended in 1949 with the exile of the nationalists to Taiwan. They had a population of illiterate, impoverished peasants, a demolished urban infrastructure, and a whole lot of local corruption to root out in order to consolidate power. A large-scale famine was inevitable. This was exacerbated by a total lack of international trade, due to anti-communist action in the West and an untrustworthy Soviet Union to the north. It was hard times.
As for Argentina... as you noted, Argentina was doing better than some European nations until the early 1960s. What happened? Well, back to the geography problem. Argentina is a remote nation, with limited ports. Spain, Italy, and Austria were part of Europe, possibly the most geographically gifted place on Earth (except for maybe the continental United States). And the US was dumping resources into Europe via the Marshall Plan, to rebuild the infrastructure and stabilize the governments. It's not surprising that they would eventually pass Argentina.
That said, the current state of Argentina is not bad. It's not rich, but it's on par with its peers in Chile and Brazil, and the debt from bad government in the 1970s/1980s is mostly paid off.
As for the cited paper... I really don't give a shit if it's been cited 450 times. It's demonstrably wrong. Developing nations with immature physical and legal infrastructures grow measurably faster than the wealthiest nations, with mature infrastructure. If you treat growth as an S-curve, this is totally an expected result. Double-digit growth rates in the developing world are not unusual. When's the last time a western nation had that kind of economic growth?