Roberto Cortés Conde is Professor Emeritus of Economy at the Universidad de San Andrés in Argentina. He is Honorary President of the International Economic History Association. He is co-editor, with Victor Bulmer-Thomas and John Coatsworth, of The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America (2006) and co-editor, with Michael D. Bordo, of Transferring Wealth and Power from the Old to the New World: Monetary and Fiscal Institutions in the 17th through the 19th Centuries (2001).

• 1. Period of rapid economic expansion: 1880–1914; 2. From World War I to the Great Depression of 1930; 3. From the 1930 financial crisis to World War II; 4. The political economy of Peronism; 5. A divided society: 1955–73; 6. The long decline.

'… this is very much the work of a skilled historian … The book's goal is to explain why Argentina failed to sustain its position as a wealthy country, which it had achieved in the first decades of the twentieth century … It will be difficult for anyone interested in Argentina's economic decline not to take this work extremely seriously …' Latin American Research Review