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Since its return to democracy, Argentina has made great efforts to address the legacy of the last military dictatorship. This paper presents a complete overview of the Argentinean policy of economic reparations for the victims of human rights violations committed between 1975-1983, including the beneficiaries, the crimes for which victims received reparations, the amounts paid, and the forms of payment. It analyzes the motivations for redressing the victims, from both national and international perspectives. It identifies the positions adopted by the different actors involved in the measures, especially the State and human rights organizations. The latter gained undeniable legitimacy by representing the victims and has consolidated into a group that has become the main actor on issues related to the legacy of the military dictatorship. The paper also focuses on economic, legal, and political questions that have arisen during the process of designing and implementing the reparation policy.

This chapter first points out that, for Argentina, the twentieth century was the period of falling behind. Although catch‐up occurred during 1860–1929, the economy at the time was mainly based on agriculture. By contrast, industrialization and technological capability building took place while the overall economy was falling behind following the government's import substitution policy and macro instability. The chapter examines technology transfer, learning, and innovation in the country's catch‐up and falling‐behind processes, and the role of intellectual property regime. It is argued that the IPR regime had little impact except for on agriculture and pharmaceuticals. These two industries are analyzed in detail to suggest that the domestic pharmaceutical firms failed to accumulate technological capabilities even in the absence of product patents and that genetically modified soybeans diffused widely because the American inventor, Monsanto, failed to secure a patent for it in Argentina.

This chapter provides an overview of the reasons behind sovereign debt defaults. It discusses trends in external indebtedness (public and private) and in government indebtedness (domestic and foreign). It describes the manner in which private lenders and investors, and official bilateral and multilateral agencies, have dealt with sovereign defaults during the 1980s and 1990s. It closes with an in-depth consideration of the case of Argentina post-2001, which promises to be the most complex sovereign default case in contemporary history. It argues that private lenders and investors have been, and continue to be, able to deal promptly and effectively with instances of sovereign default, such that new, supranational bankruptcy procedures are not necessary.

Through a comparative, longitudinal analysis of the wine industry in two Argentine provinces, this chapter examines how different political approaches to reform shapes the ability of societies to build new institutions for economic upgrading. Upgrading in wine and grapes often demands the creation of skills and the coordination of experiments in processes, products, and functions across a wide variety of organizational forms and sub-regions. Inherited structural factors per se can not easily explain the different solutions to this challenge. In particular, although voluntary associationalism improves the needed social learning and collaboration, it is also self-limiting. A better explanation focuses on how governments confront the dual challenge of redefining the boundary between the public and private domains, and of recombining the socio-economic ties among relevant firms and their respective business associations. A ‘depoliticization’ approach emphasizes the imposition of arm's-length incentives by a powerful, insulated government, but appears to contribute little to institutional change and upgrading. A ‘participatory restructuring’ approach promotes the creation of public-private institutions via adherence to two key principles: inclusion of a wide variety of relevant stakeholder groups, and rules of deliberative governance that promote collective problem-solving. The latter approach appears to have the advantage of facilitating collaboration and knowledge creation among previously antagonistic groups, including government.

Conventional economic and management theories explain that business groups facing market-liberalization policy reforms (i.e., competitive shocks) would have incentives to reduce corporate portfolios and increase internationalization. This chapter empirically examines the strategic responses of Argentine Business Groups and, through an inductive theory building process, proposes refinements to this theory. It argues that such strategy process is moderated by not only differences in market forces set out by policy reforms across different economic segments, but also by the path dependency of resources and capabilities as well as management decision making style of individual business groups. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Over the past two decades many countries have adopted multipillar pension systems that include both a public DB and a private DC pillar. Critics of these pension reforms argue that the tight link between payroll contributions and benefits in the DC pillar produce lower pensions for women. In contrast, supporters of these reforms argue that multipillar systems remove distortions that favour men and permit a more targeted public pillar that help women. This chapter examines the differential impact on genders of the new and old systems in Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. In all three cases, the new social security system includes two mandatory components: privately managed funded individual accounts (DC) and a publicly managed and financed safety net. Women accumulate retirement funds and private annuities from the DC pillar of the multipillar systems that are only 30-40% of those of men. This effect can be mitigated by introducing two critical elements into the new systems: (a) targeting the new public pillars toward low earners, because the majority of low earners are women, and (b) restricting payout provisions such as joint annuity requirements. With these modifications, total lifetime retirement benefits for women would reach 60-80% of those for men. For ‘full-career’ married women, they would equal or exceed benefits of men.

This chapter examines the processes of organizational adaptation and competitiveness of firms in an emerging economy. The study is set in the Argentine context of the 1990s when a combination of economic and political change triggered a massive change in the competitive context of indigenous firms. Two highly flexible firms from the pharmaceutical and edible oil industries are studied, and longitudinal data are supplied to explore the determinants of organizational flexibility in those organizations.

This chapter examines how Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile fared with truth and justice policies after the transition from authoritarian rule, looking at the issue from an institutional and political angle, and at the social politics of memory. Efforts to deal with the past and their significance in the overall politics of transition to democracy are shaped by country-specific historical conditions and developments: the nature and legacies of repression and authoritarian rule; and the nature of the transition process and the various political, institutional and legal factors conditioning the post-transitional period, among which are the nature of repression, the presence and strength of a human rights movement, inherited legal or constitutional limitations, relations between political parties and Human Rights Organizations (HROs), the degree of executive or party commitment to policies of truth and justice, the unity of democratic parties, the ability of the military to mobilise against any policies of accountability as well as their relations with the democratic executive, the attitude of the judiciary to past violations, the presence of a strong legislative right, and the degree to which repression penetrated the social fabric. The way in which the first democratically elected authorities deal with the past, together with the relative strength of the human rights movement in the post-transitional period, sets the agenda for the subsequent evolution of the issue; more specifically, the past remains a source of open conflict if there are loopholes in official policies that preclude full closure or amnesty, and if transnational groups or regional and international human rights bodies challenge national policies favouring impunity. The past also remains a source of conflict if there are strong HROs that continue to contest official decisions on how to deal with the past, and have allies in the formal political arena or the courts. Official policies to deal with the past are not of themselves directly relevant to the process of democratisation, and what is more, during the first transitional period, truth and justice policies are unrelated to (or may even place obstacles in the way of) wider institutional reform; the reverse is also true, but whatever the case, the past becomes part of the dynamic of democratic politics. Indeed, although the continued pursuit of truth and justice and its links to wider reforms may be difficult to establish across the board, the politics of memory more widely conceived are important for a process of democratization in all four countries examined here, as it is about how a society interprets and appropriates its past, in an attempt to mould its future, and as such it is an integral part of any political process, including progress towards deeper democracy.

The history of US human rights policy in Latin America provides useful case studies of the interplay between ‘control’ and ‘consent’ aspects of democratization. It presents a preliminary analysis of the influence of US human rights policy on human rights practices and democratization in Argentina, Guatemala, and Uruguay in the 1970s and early 1980s, focusing primarily on the Carter period. In each of these cases, the US policy attempted to influence the domestic human rights situation by linking the improvement of human rights practices to the provision of military or economic aid. But, the nature of the pressures applied and the responses thereto were quite different in the three countries, reflecting the importance of ‘consent’ issues, determined by the state of democratic transition achieved within the country concerned, in modifying the effects of ‘control’ pressures.

During the 1970s under Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, the fourth High Commissioner, UNHCR embarked on new assistance programmes in a number of refugee and refugee‐like situations around the world. The most notable of these were in Bangladesh, Uganda, and Indo‐China. There were also highly politicized refugee crises in Chile and Argentina. The UNHCR was active in the repatriation and reintegration of refugees and internally displaced persons in southern Sudan and in Angola, Guinea Bissau, and Mozambique. In addition, there were mass exoduses of refugees from Cuba and Vietnam.

This chapter examines party politics in Argentina, in particular, the breakdown of trust between citizens and political parties. Topics discussed include the political legitimacy, organizational strength, and role of political parties in the process of government. The slogan, ‘Que se vayan todos!’ reflects the middle-class frustration with the inability of politicians to understand changes in the political culture that had taken place in Argentina since 1983. At the core of those changes is the unprecedented mobilization of civil society behind the banners of the human rights movement. Since 2002, an attempt to explain the breakdown of trust between citizens and parties has given rise to a further question: how is it that the widespread repudiation of politicians in 2002 did not result in the collapse of the party system as such, and the emergence of old-style populist leadership via extra-institutional actors, as in Venezuela, Peru, or Ecuador?

In 1947 the Peronist government blacklisted the Argentinean composer Atahualpa Yupanqui, forcing him into exile in Eastern Europe and Paris. Yupanqui, then affiliated to the Communist Party, was already well known in his country for songs that celebrated the life of rural workers in the Argentinean Andes, and denounced their hardships. Yupanqui's Parisian sojourn, during which he secured the support of the French recording label Le Chant du Monde, provided him with the opportunity to introduce Argentine folklore to European audiences. This chapter focuses upon the period 1946 to 1950, analyzing Yupanqui's complex relationship with the populist policies of Perón, and assessing his appeal for French communists and fellow travellers as a privileged representative of the proletarian aesthetic.

This chapter begins with a description of life under what may be considered a perfect negation of democracy and its underlying values of recognition of agency and citizenship: the terrorist state that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. This state implanted an archetypical monologal structure of discourse. It is argued that this example is useful for showing the importance of the dialogical structures of discourse entailed by democracy. Further, it argues that as long as those dialogical structures are practiced, they are a collective self-pedagogy of citizenship and the possibility of continually discovering, actually de-reifying, the true meaning of the power and authority exercised by states and governments.

This chapter analyses the issue of indigenous land rights in Chile and Argentina. Throughout South America, indigenous peoples are being pushed to extinction through government action (and inaction), which deprives them of their lands and seriously compromises their access to life-sustaining resources. To a considerable extent, the government's attitude towards indigenous land rights is a result of a desire to attract investment to the energy and energy-related sectors. Though investor companies may appear to benefit from these tactics in the short term, it is doubtful that they will be better off in the long run as sustainability is compromised.

The concept of eminent domain is defined more as an emanation of public powers than as an outright property right, referring thus to the authority of the Sovereign to legislate and to set forth rules applicable to the private parties. The two main issues that appear constantly in this sector are: (i) the Sovereign rights and authority over underground natural resources (eminent domain) versus the acquired rights (and thus, property rights) by holders of title to exploit such resources (with respect to reserves, as well as to the hydrocarbons produced); and (ii) the limits to regulatory powers, especially facing what is now being invoked as a state of necessity, whether as an exception to international law standards' enforcement or as a modification of the latter. The nature of the eminent domain is affirmed in Argentina's Hydrocarbons Law and in its Constitution, which refers to it as dominio originario in the new section 124. This chapter analyses the past, present and future of Argentine regulations in the light of the dialectic interplay between state intervention policies and private business initiative. It also describes the new scenarios resulting from these changes.