There were four kinds of countries: developed, underdeveloped, Japan, and Argentina

For economists, Argentina is a perplexing country. To illustrate how difficult it was to understand Argentina, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Simon Kuznets once famously remarked that there were four kinds of countries: developed, underdeveloped, Japan, and Argentina. Kuznets thought so because, around the time of the First World War, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world. 

D. Acemoglu and J. Robinson, Why Nations Fail (2012), 384

This was a very large state budget for the period, and is in fact larger than what we see today in many parts of the world

[After 1688 in England] The state started expanding, with expenditures soon reaching around 10 percent of national income. This was underpinned by an expansion of the tax base ... This was a very large state budget for the period, and is in fact larger than what we see today in many parts of the world. The state budgets in Colombia, for example, reached this relative size only in the 1980s. In many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa - for example, in Sierra Leone - the state budget even today would be far smaller relative to the size of the economy without large inflows of foreign aid. 

D. Acemoglu and J. Robinson, Why Nations Fail (2012), 196