Ageing and Poverty in Argentina

Abstract

Argentina’s elderly of the 1990s had been born into one of the most prosperous countries in the world, a country which had enjoyed half a century of rapid and sustained economic growth and whose future prospects looked bright. The tremendous fertility of the Pampas region had been the base for the export of farm produce to Britain and other European countries. By the interwar years, living conditions in Argentina were much closer to those in countries such as Australia and Canada than they were to the rest of Latin America. Buenos Aires was a thriving, international metropolis, the largest city on the Atlantic coast of the Americas after New York. The Argentina of the 1930s and 1940s had a large middle class, universal education and a rapidly expanding welfare system.