Renationalization in Argentina, 2005–2013

Abstract

Since 2002, government nationalizations and contractual breaches in general around the world have surged. South America has witnessed a wave of nationalizations of private enterprises, mostly foreign. Some analysts contend that this trend is shaped by the left‐wing ideological orientation of the governments, whereas others argue that a more robust explanation is the combination of economic pressure and constraint factors. This article contributes to the debate by using a nuanced institutional analytical framework based on the concept of company versus government opportunism, applied to the recent nationalization of previously privatized companies. It examines Argentina, a country that in the last two decades has seen radical policy reversals, from sweeping privatization of state‐owned enterprises in the 1990s to a renationalization effort with some of the same companies in the early 2000s.

The Future is Public! The Global Reclaiming and Democratization of Public Ownership Beyond the Market

“…A more balanced assessment is therefore required, including a critical analysis of the myriad complex factors affecting the successful performance of PEs in some countries and the dysfunctional states of other PEs in other countries, such as in South Africa (Gumede 2016;Ashley et al 2021;Mazzucato et al 2021). It also entails distilling the proper lessons from the mixed results of recent processes of renationalization, mainly in Latin America (Berrios et al 2011;Manzetti 2016;Colbert 2017;).…”

The Politics of Fiscal Legitimacy in Developmental States: Emergency Taxes in Argentina Under Kirchnerism

“…Furthermore, hopes for a more consensual embedding of the fiscal contract were rapidly abandoned, as already upon her assumption speech President CFK outlined the role the countryside had to play in national development, stating that while she 'would like to live in a country where the main revenues are generated by industry', to achieve this it was necessary to 'agree on the deepening of this model [the government's] that has allowed us to improve substantially the lives of Argentines' (Fernández 2007). 19 At the same time, the new CFK administration not only advanced policy projects that required increased public spending, such as pension reforms, the nationalisation of key firms, and the augmentation in scope and level of cash transfer programmes (Manzetti 2016, Wylde 2016, but had to deal with the negative effects inflation was having on tax collection and an worrisome drain of foreign-currency reserves due to energy importswhich, fuelled by growing consumption and subsidised prices, had multiplied by eight in dollar terms between (SGE 2019.…”

Public versus private water delivery, remunicipalization and water tariffs

“…In both cases, the service had been privatized a few years earlier. In 2005, also, the water service in the main cities of the Argentine province of Santa Fe was re-nationalized, and shortly afterwards the same occurred in Buenos Aires and Córdoba (Manzetti, 2016). Since then, during the last ten years, dozens of cities have remunicipalized their water services.…”