I think that line is a riff on "there are four kinds of countries: developed countries, underdeveloped countries, Japan, and Argentina", attributed to the famous economist Simon Kuznets. See, e.g., https://slate.com/business/2012/04/the-four-types-of-economi...
The earliest online citation I can find is from 2011 in "Argentina: Economic Recovery and Tax Improvement after a Decade of Double Crisis" by Miguel Asensio, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23617724?seq=3 Asensio's citation is to himself, 1988. I can't find the 1988 work, but from the 2011 footnote it seems the quote is hearsay from a peer of Kuznets, Paul Samuelson, and might have been intended as a tongue-in-cheek gloss on Kuznets broader body of work, much of which analyzed the relationships between industrialization, social change, and wealth. In any event, one way or another the meaning is clearly to suggest in dry academic humor that Argentina and Japan defy rigorous theory or description. (One more recent citation I found from a Google Books snippet claims that the original context implied that Japan is an example of a country that developed economically without losing its undeveloped-economy social institutions, while Argentina is a developed country with developed-country social institutions that become undeveloped in fact.)
The earliest online citation I can find is from 2011 in "Argentina: Economic Recovery and Tax Improvement after a Decade of Double Crisis" by Miguel Asensio, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23617724?seq=3 Asensio's citation is to himself, 1988. I can't find the 1988 work, but from the 2011 footnote it seems the quote is hearsay from a peer of Kuznets, Paul Samuelson, and might have been intended as a tongue-in-cheek gloss on Kuznets broader body of work, much of which analyzed the relationships between industrialization, social change, and wealth. In any event, one way or another the meaning is clearly to suggest in dry academic humor that Argentina and Japan defy rigorous theory or description. (One more recent citation I found from a Google Books snippet claims that the original context implied that Japan is an example of a country that developed economically without losing its undeveloped-economy social institutions, while Argentina is a developed country with developed-country social institutions that become undeveloped in fact.)