CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Many advanced and peripheral countries have undergone long lasting deindustrialisation, whose negative economic and labour market effects have been discussed extensively in the literature. In this context, the analysis of specific country experiences in which the deindustrialisation process would seem to have at least been halted may contribute to the debate on the feasibility and possible forms of reindustrialisation, and on the adequate industrial policies to further it. In this paper I focus in the case of Argentina where, after long term deindustrialisation of GDP and employment (mid 1970s to end of 1990s), further aggravated by the very deep crisis of 1999-2002, followed a period of sustained expansion of manufacturing production, facilitated by restrictions on imports. High growth rates of manufacturing output, employment and labour productivity started in 2003 and continued, practically uninterrupted, up to 2011. The analysis presented in this paper centers in this expansionary period, exploring the inter relationships between the sources of productivity growth, the demand for skills, and skill wage differentials. To reach a better understanding, salient trends of this period are contrasted with those prevailing in the latest stage of the preceding deindustrialisation. The study is expected to throw some light on the nature of the growth process in manufacturing industry during the 2003-2011 period, in particular on the role played by technical progress. The paper is organised as follows. In the first section, the stages of industrialisation (1940s-mid 1970s) and deindustrialisation (mid 1970s-end of 1990s) in Argentina, and the crisis (1999-2002) that ended the economic liberalisation decade (1990s) are briefly reviewed. In the second section, the policies implemented to promote import substitution (from the initial reliance on currency devaluation to measures to protect domestic production) and the recovery of manufacturing production from 2003 up to 2011 are characterised, showing that, in spite of growth of manufacturing output and employment, its GDP and employment shares did not increase vis-à-vis the latest expansionary phase of the deindustrialisation period, and that the structure of manufacturing production and employment in terms of economic activities and firm sizes practically did not change. The factors behind the growth of labour productivity are examined next (section 3) concluding, on the basis of the analysis of aggregate data and of a cross industry study, that in 2003-2011, in the context of ample labour availability, investment in modern, labour saving technology does not seem to have played a significant role. As analysed in section 4, the above conclusion helps to understand why the demand for highly skilled labour (professionals and technicians) did not increase relatively in nearly a decade of growth. Changes in the skill structure of manufacturing employment resemble those typically associated with the economic cycle (retention of highly skilled personnel during recession, recruitment of manual workers during expansion), and do not suggest that a new pattern of industrial growth is underway. Last, the fact that increases in labour demand were concentrated in manual workers, in combination with the institutional mechanisms of wage determination, contributes to explain why, in spite of the availability of manual labour, skill wage differentials narrowed in the 2003-2011 period. This is discussed in section 5. The study reconfirms that protection of domestic manufacturing production not necessarily suffices per se to reverse the consequences of deindustrialisation, nor to stimulate the incorporation of technical progress and modernisation, and consequently the demand for highly skilled labour.

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