Strengthening Argentina's Integration into the Global Economy

Policy Proposals for Trade, Investment, and Competition

Martha Martínez Licetti, Mariana Iootty, Tanja Goodwin, José Signoret

• Publisher: World Bank
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781464812750
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Economics

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.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Abbreviations
• Executive Summary
• Chapter 1: Quo Vadis, Argentina? Context, Outlook, and Possible Scenarios
• Chapter 2: International Experience with Structural Microeconomic Reforms
• Chapter 3: Strengthening Institutions for Effective Integration into the Global Economy
• Chapter 4: A Step-by-Step Reform Agenda That Will Allow Companies to Integrate into the Global Economy
• Chapter 5: Conclusions
• Appendix A Theoretical and Empirical Links among Trade, Investment, and Competition from the Literature
• Appendix B Links between Macroeconomic and Factor Market Policies for Integration
• Appendix C The CGE Framework
• Appendix D The OECD PMR Methodology
• Appendix E Calculation of the Potential Impact of Reforms Associated with Less Restrictive Service Regulations
• Appendix F Specifications of the Price Regression
• Appendix G Detailed Matrix of Policy Recommendations
• Boxes
• Figures
• Map
• Tables