The Trade Policy Review Mechanism, a permanent feature of the World Trade Organization (WTO), is designed to contribute to improving adherence by all WTO members to rules, disciplines, and commitments made under the Multilateral Trade Agreement. This volume in the series provides information on the trade policies, practices, and macroeconomic situations of Argentina. Each Trade Policy Review is expertly prepared after in-depth analysis of an individual nation by the WTOs Trade Policy Review Board.

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.

Much of the literature that studies the relationship between trade and poverty in developing countries focuses on the effects of national trade reforms, such as own tariff reductions. In contrast, the World Trade Organization negotiations at the Doha Round were more concerned with the poverty effects on low-income countries, and of foreign reforms, such as the elimination of agricultural subsidies in industrial economies. The author empirically compares the relative poverty impacts of national and foreign trade reforms in Argentina. The author investigates national trade reforms, including tariff cuts on consumption goods and capital goods in Argentina. Foreign trade reforms include the elimination, in industrial countries, of agricultural subsidies and trade barriers on agricultural manufactures and industrial manufactures. These policies enhance the market access of Argentine exports. Overall, a combination of own reforms and enhanced market access would cause poverty to decline by between 1.7 and 4.6 percentage points. This evidence suggests that trade policies can be important poverty-reducing instruments in Argentina.

From the twentieth century until World War II, Argentina was a leading exporter of agricultural goods. In the early 1980s, agriculture accounted for roughly 57 percent of the country's total exports. During the period covered by this study (1961 to 1985), Argentina's trade policy, which was carried out through export taxes on the main agricultural and agroindustrial products and through industrial protection, was designed to discriminate against most exports vis-a-vis imports. This study examines the impact of trade and exchange rate policies on wheat, corn, sorghum, soybeans, sunflower seeds and beef production. One of its prinicipal findings is that direct price intervention substantially reduced producer prices and that industrial protection policies and overvaluation of the real exchange rate taxed agriculture even more than direct interventions. The study also explores the political factors underlying the establishment of policies that had these negative effects. The main conclusion is that external events, such as the Great Depression and World War II led to a fall in export prices and to higher import prices. Policies were established in the post war period to maintain the protection to import-substitutes and the taxation of agriculture. Export taxes were seen as a way of keeping domestic food prices low and of improving fiscal equilibrium by producing larger tax revenues.