Estudio del Desempeño Económico Regional: el caso Argentino

In this work the economic performance of the Argentinean provinces during the period 1961-2000 is studied. The economic performance is defined from regimes defined by the growth rate and the production per capita of each province during the period. Clusters of performance and their evolution is studied using hierarchical clustering techniques. The main results of the work shows the existence of two clusters with provinces having similar economic performance, and a group of transitional provinces that are moving between the two clusters and in some periods they do not belong to neither of the two groups. On the one hand there is a cluster of poor performance provinces, and on the other hand there is a cluster of high performance provinces. These high performance provinces depend mainly on primary sectors and they are located at the center of the country. The analyses of the results suggest that there is no automatic mechanism of convergence among Argentinean provinces.