The Manufacturing Sector in Argentina at the beginning of the twenty-first century

Abstract

The arrival of Néstor Kirchner in May 2003 and the two successive presidencies of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner after this administration marked a turning point again. By rejecting the main ideas of the Washington consensus and using a set of economic policies aimed at restoring real wages, favoring domestic consumption and investmentwith successful policies of de-indebtedness, the country had an enormous growth in the industrial sector that for the first time since the industrialization by import substitution stage grew at average annual rates higher than the aggregate of the economy. However, the virtuous dynamics of the industrial sector of growth and job generation could not be sustained over the 12 years that Kirchnerism remained in power, and since 2012 the sector started to show signs of being limited by the resurgence of the external constraint. The arrival of Mauricio Macri in December 2015 to the presidency increased these imbalances due to the decision to return to the application of neoliberal policies (such as economic liberalization, financial deregulation, and external indebtedness). All these policies had a huge impact on the Argentine economy and in particular on the performance of the industrial sector. The objectives of this chapter are, first, to examine the productive transformations that the Argentine manufacturing sector has experienced since the late 1990s to the present; second, to give an account of thecapacity of the industrial sector to generate employment and the evolution of real wages of industrial workers; third, to examine the degree of relation that the sector has with foreign markets as well as the degree of external dependence of its productive structure; and finally, to study the impact that industrial policies had on the performance of the sector.