The Argentine agricultural export model relative to the focus of the national innovation system

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate about the "agroexport led-growth model", a crucial stage of the Argentine economic process of development, from the perspective of the "national innovation system" theory. Based on this perspective it is argued that: a) even though the success of the agroexport led-growth model was founded on Argentina's natural competitive advantages and on the rapid growth of the international demand for grains and meat, it also required the adoption and diffusion of significant institutional, organizational and technological innovations, that allowed not only farming modernisation, but also the emerging of an incipient but dynamic industrial sector; b) the emphasis made in a large part of the received literature on the assumed absence of "Schumpeterian" entrepreneurs in Argentina reveals an underestimation of the modernization process which took place in that period, as well as a limited attention to the impact of the changes in the international scenario on Argentina's economic development process and a conceptual approximation, as we see unsatisfactory, to the complex set of interactions that exist between the institutional framework in vogue in a certain society and the private agents behaviours; c) the configuration of the national innovation system during the agroexport led-growth model imposed limitations to the economic development process during that stage, as well as an "inheritance" that later constituted a limiting factor to the new style of development that the country had to adopt after the crisis of 1930.