In the classic theory about the evolution of economies in the long term, Adam Smith and Simon Kuznets proposed two contrasting theories about the evolution of the labor market in a period of economic growth. Smith proposed a growth in the labor markets guided by the more dynamic and productive sectors through a process of specialization led by the insertion in international commerce. Kuznets, instead, theorizes that the growing modern economies generate changes and diversification on the labor

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... arkets towards secondary and tertiary sectors and on the skills stock of the labor force. With that in mind, this work presents an analysis of the labor structure in Argentina during the first globalization period (1870-1914) through a classification of workers and the economic active population divided by sectors and skills, using the occupational compilation of the national census of 1869, 1895 and 1914. The main results show that, despite the high growth of the economy during the first part of the studied period (1870-1895), Argentina did not show high changes in the labor structure at an inter-sectoral level. However, the growth of the economy, especially after 1890, involved a series of transformations on the labor markets that modified their composition and the intensity of skills by the labor force.