The Manufacturing Sector in Argentina at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century

During its model of industrialization by import substitution, Argentina achieved not only the deepest and most articulated industrial framework of the Latin American region, but also the most organized and combative working class. The military dictatorship that seized power in March 1976 aimed to interrupt the process of industrialization, and to eradicate the bases that made it sustainable, and the attack was particularly severe on the organizational capability of the working class. Not only did the return to democracy at the beginning of the 1980s fail to reverse the development model based on financial valorization, but this economic model was deepened during the following democratic administrations that ended up with the economic and social crisis of 2001. 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 investment with successful policies of de-indebtedness, the country had 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. The objectives of this chapter are, first, to examine the productive transformations that the Argentine manufacturing sector has experienced from the late 1990s to the present; second, to give an account of the capacity 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.