Christian Democrat

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Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world at the beginning of the 20th century— (This Data Insight was written by @EOrtizOspina.) When I first visited Buenos Aires some years ago, I was struck by how grand the city's historic architecture was. This is something that strikes many tourists: parts of the city feel closer to Paris than you’d expect from a country whose income level today is more similar to my home country of Colombia than to France. This chart helps put that observation in perspective. It shows the ten richest countries in the world in 1910, according to GDP per capita estimates from economic historians. By this measure, Argentina was among the world’s richest countries in 1910, ahead of several Western European countries, including Germany and France. It also stood clearly ahead of its peers in Latin America at the time. But over the course of the 20th century, Western European economies grew far faster, especially after the Second World War, and Argentina fell behind. A long-run perspective like this shows how much of a difference economic growth can make within just a few generations.