The Nature of Public Policies in Argentina

Abstract

We have established in previous chapters several characteristics of the Argentine policy-making environment. Congress is not an important policy arena; presidents tend to have excessive leeway to change policy, except when they face fierce opposition of provincial governors; and nobody has much incentive to invest in long-term policy-making capabilites. Argentina also lacks institutional arrangements, such as a professional bureaucracy or an independent judiciary, that would facilitate enforcement of agreements. These characteristics correspond to what, in the language of Part I of the book, we would describe as a policy-making environment not conducive to cooperation. And, as we established in Proposition 1, a noncooperative policy-making environment can lead to policy volatility, rigid rules, inability to instrument some efficient policy changes, and underinvestment in capacities, all leading to low-quality policies. In this chapter we provide evidence on the characteristics of public policies that fits these predictions. Previous chapters have already provided some evidence on that regard with respect to policies pertaining to the federal fiscal domain and to civil service policy. This chapter starts with a generic characterization of policies in Argentina, drawing on some international data sets, and then provides vignettes of the process of policy making in some specific policy areas such as international trade negotiations, social policies, pension reform, and regulation of privatized utilities.