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Renationalization in Argentina, 2005–2013

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Luigi Manzetti
Luigi Manzetti*
Affiliation:
Southern Methodist University. lmanzett@smu.edu
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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.

Type
Research
Information
Latin American Politics and Society , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , Spring 2016 , pp. 3 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © University of Miami 2016

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