Industrial policy and development in peripheral economies: reflections about Argentina

ORMAECHEA, EMILIA; ORMAECHEA, EMILIA; MORETTI, LUCIANO; MORETTI, LUCIANO; SIDLER, JOEL; SIDLER, JOEL

Bilbao

Conferencia; 32nd Annual EAEPE Conference: The Evolution of Capitalist Structures: Uncertainty, Inequality, and Climate Crisis.; 2020

EAEPE European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy

By the middle of the last century, industry acquired central importance in the discussion of economic development. In the case of Latin America, it was associated with the deployment of import-substituting-industrialization strategies implemented as political projects of development, and to the emergence, in the academic and theoretical field, of the Latin American structuralism. These contributions highlighted the need to industrialize peripheral economies to overcome their subordinating and dependent positioning in the world capitalist economy.Nevertheless, 70 years after the emergence of those strategies and contributions, Latin American countries remain peripheral economies, and a large part of the problems they face to develop are similar to those identified by the structuralism during those years. That is to say, they are considerably primary and concentrated economies with heterogenic productive and employment structures. This configures not only a widely unequal and exclusive economic and social structure but also a subordinating and dependent way of international insertion. In addition, industry continues to play a potential role in transforming Latin American productive structures, reducing structural heterogeneity, improving the quality of employment and achieving a more egalitarian pattern of economic, social, and spatial reproduction.Now, the discussion about political industry and its strategic role for development today requires considering the important processes of capitalist transformation that took place since the emergence of Latin American structuralism, and particularly after de 1970 crisis. Precisely, those redefinitions implied substantial changes in the dynamics of capitalist accumulation and regulation that, far from overcoming the differentiation between central and peripheral economies, have reconfigured them and made them even more complex.In the framework of this problematization, the paper analyzes the importance of political industry for the development of Latin American peripheral economies, under the current dynamics of global capitalism, by focusing particularly on the Argentinian case. To do so, first, the processes of capitalist transformation from 1970 onwards are analyzed by highlighting the main characteristics that accompanied the redefinitions of the central-peripheral relationship. Second,the characteristics of Argentina?s productive structure are examined, as well as the main industrial policies implemented during the last five decades. Finally, the importance of industrial development as a strategy of productive development and reduction of structural inequalities in Argentina is considered, as well as the challenges that such strategy implies, as a peripheral economy, internally and externally.