Always Inefficient? The Building of Technological Capabilities in an Argentine State-Owned Company: Petroquímica General Mosconi (1970-1994)
Consensus about the flaws of the postwar Latin-American economic strategy has pointed to the technological backwardness as one of the main limits of the so-called “import substitution industrialization” (ISI), especially in its second, or “difficult” stage. The overall look on the development strategy followed between 1950 and 1980 has extensively recognized the lack of incentives to improve the methods and processes of the newly created industrial sectors. However, recent research has allowed to better qualify many of the previously assumed achievements and failures of the ISI.
My paper intends to contribute to this renewing vision of the Argentine industrialization and of the role that the public enterprises played in it. As I have shown elsewhere, the country witnessed a “nationalistic turn” in its economic policy around 1970. Because of this reorientation, some big State-owned enterprises decided to expand their range of activities. The public oil company (YPF) and the holding of military plants (DGFM) partnered to create new ventures in the petrochemical sector. That was the origin of Petroquímica General Mosconi (PGM) and Petroquímica Bahía Blanca, firms that changed the landscape of the production of these basic industrial inputs in the country.
Using original archival material from PGM up to the moment of privatization in 1994, I intend to show that this public limited company was profitable, efficient and that had a strong interest in developing own technological capabilities. I propose to study some measures undertaken for this purpose, as the establishment of joint-research groups with other (domestic and foreign) companies; the signing of agreements with scientific agencies for the training of its personnel; sending in-house engineers to the American and European licensee companies to directly participate in their design activities; the set-up of research laboratories in PGM's facilities with universities, among others.
