During the first wave of globalization, Argentina was among the most internationally integrated economies, experiencing a rising trend in trade openness and a tremendous increase in labor due to migration. In this paper, we empirically show the central role immigration had in boosting exports and imports in the years 1870–1913 by considering Argentine bilateral trade and migration from eight European countries (Austro-Hungarian Empire, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and United Kingdom). We use a migration-augmented gravity model to estimate the contribution of the massive inflows of Europeans, and we find that the main pro-trade effect was on imports: a percent 10% increase in migrants from a particular country would increase imports by up to 8% from that same country. We do not find the same effect on exports. The disproportionate decrease in transportation rather than communication costs may explain why the latter are relatively more decisive for exports than for imports. To overcome the problem of reverse causality and endogeneity, we use migration flows to the US from the eight European countries as an instrumental variable. In so doing, we aim at capturing the same push (but not Argentine pull) factors inducing European out-migration.

在第一波全球化浪潮中，阿根廷是国际一体化程度最高的经济体之一，贸易开放呈上升趋势，劳动力因移民而大幅增加。在本文中，我们通过考虑阿根廷双边贸易和来自八个欧洲国家（奥匈帝国、比利时、法国、德国、意大利、西班牙、瑞士和英国）。我们使用移民增强的引力模型来估计欧洲人大量流入的贡献，我们发现主要的贸易促进效应是对进口的影响：来自特定国家的移民增加 10% 将使进口增加多达8%来自同一个国家。我们没有发现对出口的相同影响。运输成本而非通讯成本的不成比例下降可以解释为什么后者对出口的决定性比对进口的决定性更大。为了克服反向因果关系和内生性问题，我们使用从八个欧洲国家到美国的移民流量作为工具变量。在这样做的过程中，我们的目标是捕捉同样的推动（但不是阿根廷的拉动）因素，这些因素会导致欧洲向外移民。