Long-Term Economic Effects of Populist Legal Reforms: Evidence from Argentina

In this paper, we examine the consequences of populist government for long-term economic growth and development. To this end, we estimate the long-term growth impact of the Juan Péron’s political rule in Argentina, which led to a comprehensive overhaul of the institutional framework laid by the Argentine founding fathers in the 1853 Constitution. Our hypothesis is that the progressive substitution of a growth-enhancing institutional framework by exclusionary growth-distorting frameworks explains Argentina’s economic decline from one the world’s richest countries on the eve of World War I to an underdeveloped nation in the present day. We emphasize the erosion of the rule of law and restraint of economic freedom during Perón’s first government (1943–1955) as two fundamental coadjutant causes of Argentina’s decline. The populist legal reforms of Perón had long-lasting adverse economic effects. By comparing Argentina’s pre-Péron growth trajectory with a donor pool of 58 countries for the period 1860–2015, we estimate the counterfactual scenario without Péron’s reforms. A variety of synthetic control estimates uncover substantial negative effects of the weakening of the rule of law and the populist reforms that began in 1940s on the trajectory of economic growth and development. The populist overhaul negated the economic growth advantages inherent in the 1853 Alberdian constitution. Without the short-sighted populist Peron episodes, Argentina would be a rich country down to the present day with per capita income comparable to southern European countries. We also perform a series of randomization inferences and a battery of placebo analyses, which confirm our results. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41294-022-00193-4.