This book argues that for infrastructure privatization programs, differences in firm organizational structure explain the viability of privatization contracts in weak institutional environments.

Integration into global markets can improve the efficiency of the Argentinian economy, providing opportunities for private investment to flourish and for the associated benefits to accrue to consumers. Among many policies that are important for integrating into the global economy, particularly relevant are trade, investment, and competition policies. They all share a common attribute: the capacity to shape the incentives of firms to improve resource allocation and to strengthen productivity while integrating into international markets. Once properly combined, investment, trade, and competition polices have mutually reinforcing relationships in the sense that growth dividends stemming from reforms in one policy area are reinforced when properly combined with reforms in the other two. Against this backdrop, this report follows a three-pronged approach. It presents a set of robust empirical analyses †“ drawing from both general and partial equilibrium exercises - to assess the potential impacts from trade, competition, and investment policy reforms. It offers a new comparative review of international experience with structural microeconomic reform programs to bring insights for Argentina’s design and sequencing of such reforms. Finally, it presents individual reform recommendations for each institution in charge of the three respective policy areas in an integrated step-by-step framework from the firm perspective to illustrate the critical challenges to investment and internationalization for Argentinian firms.

The crises of industrialization and nation building have produced varying foreign policies and associated domestic images in Argentina. Classic liberals see the country as a Western, European society whose difficulties will be resolved through fuller and more effective participation in world affairs. Statist nationalists see a dependent, developing

This paper describes economic developments in Argentina during the 1990s. Since the implementation of the Convertibility Plan in early 1991, real GDP grew by more than 7 percent a year (or by a cumulative 35 percent over the years 1991–94), after stagnating for more than a decade. At the same time, consumer price inflation, which had peaked at 3,000 percent in 1989, declined to 4 percent (average) in 1994. Gross fixed investment recovered to nearly 20 percent of GDP by 1994, reflecting a real growth rate of 22 percent a year during the period.