The challenge of increasing and diversifying Argentina's exports in Asia: tariff restrictions[El desafío de incrementar y diversificar las exportaciones de Argentina en Asia: restricciones arancelarias]

Argentina's exports had a period of strong expansion during 2003-2008, in a context of high dynamism of world trade, stimulated by Asian economies -especially China-. Agricultural products were the ones that grew the most to these partners. But after the rebound of the crisis, the international context changed. Asian stimulus has desaccelerated and the prices of the commodities have started to fall, consequently Argentina's exports have not been able to come back to the track of expansion that had before de crisis. In this new scenery, Argentina's government created the Programa de Aumento y Diversificación de Exportaciones (PADEX), a plan aimed to improve the quantitative and qualitative performance of the country's exports. The objective of this paper is to analyze if there is any tariff barriers that could block the possibilities of expand exports of a group of products –selected by measuring Argentina's comparative advantage- to the selected partners. The results show important opportunities of rising exports of products like animal food, milk and cream, malt extract, tobacco, crustaceans and mollusks. Only a few countries of the group analyzed present relevant tariff barriers for these products. The countries with higher tariffs for Argentinian products are China, Korea and India. Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and, to a lesser extent, Thailand, show greater opportunities for Argentinian products.