Fernando Navajas

 The subject matter of the thesis is the study of managerial incentive schemes for public enterprises. The problem of incentives and control is characterized in Chapter I stressing asymmetric information and preferences between principal (Minister) and agent (Manager). Chapter II reconsiders the findings of some previous works on the use of simple mechanisms under certainty and it shows that incentive problems may be solved with a pure-rent type contract. One of the parameters of the contract (profit-sharing ratio) is central to the enforcement of 'managerial' efficiency while the relative weights given to profit and (an approximation to) consumer surplus will influence optimal pricing decisions. This feature is maintained in a risky environment (Chapter III) although reinterpreted in a second-best fashion due to the trade-off between incentives and risk-sharing. The weights given to each side of the contract depend on the impact of price changes upon the degree of profit-uncertainty and the managerially self-selected level of effort. In addition it is shown that, when providing incentives, the Minister will depart from the pricing rule derived under full information. Chapter IV shows that these results are valid when capacity choice and non-price rationing issues become relevant. Chapter V attempts to integrate the issues of performance indicators and efficiency audits into the previous framework. It is shown that there must exist an upper limit to the admissible number of performance indicators and that efficiency audits can be designed as conditional investigation procedures and used according to an expected cost-benefit characterization. Some central underlying factors affecting the form of the optimal investigation strategy are identified. Finally, Chapter VI attempts to consider the previous results and their implications within a brief discussion of U.K. policy for public enterprises in the last decades.

Los precios de los servicios públicos y los combustibles han jugado un rol importante en la política económica argentina ya que, en general, han sido parte de las medidas instrumentadas con el objetivo de controlar la inflación y mejorar la distribución del ingreso. En este libro se realiza un estudio empírico del impacto de la evolución de esos precios sobre los niveles tarifarios reales, la distribución del ingreso, las cuentas fiscales y los incentivos de las empresas y los consumidores. Para el estudio de estos temas se contaba, al inicio de este proyecto, con información desde 1945 hasta 1989. La serie fue discontinuada existiendo desde entonces solo información dispersa y parcial. Un objetivo central fue cubrir ese bache sobre variables fundamentales en el proceso económico del país. El libro contiene cuatro capítulos. En el capítulo 1 se analiza la evolución para el periodo desde 1989 hasta 2018. La elaboración de este demandó un gran esfuerzo dado que desde el comienzo de la etapa privatizadora la información fue escasa y se encontraba dispersa; se acudió entonces a informes oficiales, trabajos de consultoría y de investigación. En el capítulo 2 se empalmó la serie con la existente desde 1945 para contar con la evolución en el largo plazo (75 años). El deterioro tarifario real en varios momentos de la historia llevó, dadas sus consecuencias, a la reversión de las medidas por su impacto sobre las cuentas fiscales, los incentivos para productores y consumidores, las restricciones de la oferta y a la existencia de ciclos tarifarios reales muy pronunciados. Estos ciclos plantean, desde el punto de vista teórico, preguntas referidas a su génesis, desarrollo y desenlace o salida. En el capítulo 3 se estudia en particular la política de reversión del deterioro tarifario que se instrumentó desde enero de 2016 hasta diciembre 2019. Las empresas de servicios públicos (ESP) son multiproducto. Producen bienes finales para las familias (BCF: por ejemplo, energía eléctrica y gas residencial, transporte de pasajeros) y bienes intermedios para la producción (BCI: energía eléctrica y gas para consumidores industria-les, comerciales y del sector servicios, transporte de cargas). En el capítulo 4 se analiza la evolución de los precios de los BCI para el Comercio, la Industria y los Servicios construyendo niveles generales para cada sector y un nivel general para el conjunto.Facultad de Ciencias Económica

Introduction E.Bour, D.Heymann & F.Navajas PART I: MACROECONOMIC CRISES A Comparison of Currency Crises between Asia and Latin America K.Hamada Latin American and the External Crisis of the Second Half of the 1990s V.Corbo Banking Crises in Latin America in the 1990s: Lessons from Argentina, Paraguay and Venezuela A.Garcia Herrero On the Causes of the Latin American and Asian Currency Crises of the 1990s M.Fratzscher Contagion in Emerging Markets: When Wall Street in the Carrier G..Calvo PART II: TRADE AND TRADE AGREEMENTS Preferential Trade Agreements at the Turn of the Century T.N.Srinivasan The Role of Sub-regional Agreements in Latin American Economic Integration V.Urquidi International Specialization and Trade Regimes in Argentina 1960-99 L.Miotti, C.Quenan & C.Winograd Testing the Short- and Long-run Exchange Rate Effects on the Trade Balance: The Case of Colombia H.Rincon External Shocks, Relative Prices and Sectoral Reallocation in a Small Open Economy: Evidence from Mexico ...

This technical note examines the interactions between infrastructure and productivity growth in Mexico. To address this relation, we follow an approach that seek to tie down infrastructure productivity improvements in terms of the impact of particular types of infrastructure on particular sectors, thus providing the basis for informed decisions on investment priorities for economic growth. We have been able to identify significant relations between labor and capital productivity improvements, or capital deepening (i.e., investment) in infrastructure-related sectors and labor productivity improvements in other sectors. Sectoral infrastructure priorities can be found in the transport and energy sectors, broadly defined, with effects that have regional differences. The nature of our results points to complementary policies and the need to improve the regulatory compact for infrastructure in Mexico. Our results recommend special attention to the regulatory/competition policy approach in...

... Por un lado, la inflación tiene claramente consecuencias graves(y percibidas como tales) en el comportamiento económico; por otro lado, el hecho de que ciertos países atraviesen largos periodos de fuerte volatilidad de precios y experimenten dificultades apreciables para ...

En esta nota nos proponemos, primero, difundir algunos aspectos centrales del mecanismo de manejo o racionamiento de la demanda adoptados por Brasil en la crisis eléctrica de 2001. Luego comentamos comparativamente las medidas adoptadas en la Argentina durante el año 2004. A partir de allí se extraen conclusiones que apuntan a clarificar las importantes diferencias que separan a ambos casos –Brasil 2001 y Argentina 2004– y las posibles debilidades del esquema argentino para obtener los resultados esperados, incluyendo una evaluación preliminar que indica un efecto acotado del programa aplicado en gas natural. En una última sección, se actualizan los cambios producidos en el esquema argentino durante el año 2005, que resultan una respuesta parcial a algunas de las debilidades del diseño original del programa.

Este trabajo anaLiza la interseccion entre la integracion de la infraestructura de energia y las perspectivas contractuales para estudiar el surgimiento y la caida de la reciente integracion de la infraestructura de gas natural entre Argentina y Chile. Se sostiene que, en muchos casos, los desequilibrios de los mercados internos relacionados con shocks o decisiones sobre politicas convierten a los contratos incompletos de intercambio (que deben verse respaldados por la infraestructura) en el problema central. Al examinar las pruebas sobre el reciente desempeno insuficiente del sector de energia en Argentina, este trabajo analiza las razones probables de las restricciones generalizadas del suministro a Chile para distinguir entre las distintas explicaciones posibles de la interrupcion de los intercambios, esenciales para comprender la probable fuente del caracter incompleto de los contratos y para calificar las visiones opuestas de los recientes litigios del sector privado. Tambien a...

Presenta la incorporacion y generacion local de conocimientos tecnologicos en una planta metalmecanica argentina, la cual se desarrolla dentro de una tecnologia discontinua, donde el nivel, estabilidad y ritmo de crecimiento de la demanda condicionan tanto el ritmo como la naturaleza del desarrollo tecnologico alcanzado por la firma.

This chapter considers the distribution effects of price changes in Argentina following a decade of structural reform. During the 1990s, Argentina introduced price stabilization policies, changed its tax and expenditure systems, privatized public services and industries, eliminated international trade barriers through sharp reductions in tariffs, and, finally, deregulated many goods and services markets.

This paper examines sectoral productivity shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, their aggregate impact, and the possible compensatory effects of improving productivity in infrastructure-related sectors. We employ the KLEMS annual dataset for a group of OECD and Latin America and the Caribbean countries, complemented with high-frequency data for 2020. First, we estimate a panel vector autoregression of growth rates in sector level labor productivity to specify the nature and size of sectoral shocks using the historical data. We then run impulse-response simulations of one standard deviation shocks in the sectors that were most affected by COVID 19. We estimate that the pandemic cut economy-wide labor productivity by 4.9 percent in Latin America, and by 3.5 percent for the entire sample. Finally, by modeling the long-run relationship between productivity shocks in the sectors most affected by COVID 19, we find that large productivity improvements in infrastructure--equivalent to at least t...

The topics covered in the chapters of the report were presented and discussed in a conference organized by the IDB in Port of Spain on July 13th, 2004. After more than a decade of economic growth and despite encouraging prospects for the future, the Trinidad and Tobagp economy remains overly dependent on the oil and gas sector, the public sector lacks capacity, and pockets of poverty persist. How can the country promote sustainable and equitable development, and thus reduce poverty? The Government of Trinidad and Tobago, in consensus with major stakeholders, has confronted this question in its Vision 2020 - an ambitious program that calls for Trinidad and Tobago to achieve developed-country status by the year 2020. As the country sets out to meet this longer term goal, it must begin to tackle some pressing development challenges in the short to medium term, including economic diversifi cation through private sector development, modernization of the public sector and improved social services. In this context, we believe the timing of this report to be most opportune. To achieve sustainable growth and to benefit its citizens more equitably, the country must continue to grapple with major issues. This report sheds light on some of the most pressing ones.

Macroeconomic crises in Argentina put public utility pricing under stress giving way to a cycle in real rates with changes in price structures in several dimensions. We summarize some stylized facts and then work on a simple model of public economics that can be used to represent observed phenomena in analytical terms. Some differences or delays in the current pattern of behavior are shown to depend on a relaxation of profit and budget constraints.

During 2004-06 Bolivia experienced a five-fold increase in oil revenues due to tax/contractual innovations, higher prices and larger volumes at the same time that a multi-lateral debt reduction initiative trimmed roughly one third of the public external debt. The political economy setting of this environment entails a new hydrocarbons law that automatically decentralize expenditures to local gov-ernments and nationalization of the oil industry. We model fiscal dynamics in Bolivia in an stochastic framework and find that the new status-quo will generate double reversions of primary surplus and a public debt path that may fall short of being pleasant in the presence of unfettered fiscal spending and/or decline in international energy prices and gas demand from its neighbors. Even though it is difficult to asses the underlying fiscal policy reaction function to future devel-opments in Bolivia, we conclude that governance of the process of allocation and distribution of the oil rent is ...

We address the causes behind the drop in natural gas production in Argentina since 2004, starting from a basic supply model that depends on economic incentives, and adding control variables related to different potential explanations such as firm specific (or area specific) behavior and the absence of contractual renegotiation of concessions extensions. Results from a panel of the change in natural gas production in all areas between 2004 and 2009 show that once a basic supply-past production (or reserve) relationship is modeled, other often mentioned effects become non-significant. Chiefly among them are firm specific effects and the role of renegotiations of concessions extensions. We find preliminary evidence that post 2007 renegotiations –which are associated with better price prospects- may have had an impact in correcting production decline in one leader firm. Other significant effects come from a negative impact of a change in the seasonality of production that in turn can be...

El proposito de este trabajo es analizar la situacion fiscal de Ecuador y las perspectivas. Durante los anos 2000 y 2001 el resultado del Sector Publico No Financiero (SPNF) se convirtio en superavitario promediando 1.2% del PIB que se compara favorablemente con un deficit de casi 2% del PIB para la decada 1992-2001. Este resultado se obtiene por la mejora en los precios del petroleo que incrementan los ingresos del gobierno a 9.1% del PIB (1.3% mas que lo observado en la decada 92-01) y por el aumento en los ingresos no petroleros en mas de 3 puntos del PIB en buena medida explicado por una mayor recaudacion del IVA. Esto permitio duplicar el superavit primario en un contexto en el cual el gasto primario se contuvo en alrededor de 21% del PIB.

This presentation comments on Charles Sabel's "Long Term Strategic Policies for Global Competition." The document points out a series of insights, methodologies, and suggestions on three aspects: new stylized facts of economic development, developing economies as Toyoda systems, and clues to guide a search for suitable development policy. Then, the author expands and comments using Argentina as a case. This presentation was presented at the LAEBA Second Annual Conference, held on November, 2005 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Traditionally, the water sector has been managed by the public sector in Argentina. However, in the last 10years, Argentina has experimented with private participation on a scale and at a pace beyond other experiences in Latin America. The first two concessions granted in Argentina were in the province ofCorrientes and the city of Buenos Aires. Each of the two concession processes, regulatory frameworks, and institutional contexts had relative advantages and disadvantages. These differences may have affected both the resulting performance of the two water companies and the post-contract negotiations. This chapter demonstrates the impact of the institutional and political context on the outcomes of concession arrangements, and highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the various actors involved in the process of improving water services with private sector participation.

We study the consequences of a binding constraint on the level of public expenditures directed at sustaining an environmental resource, which enters as a public input (alongside capital) into the economy-wide production function. As expected, the long run stock of that resource is reduced: however, we also find that the long run capital stock is reduced in a larger proportion. Also, the capital-environmental resource ratio becomes sensitive to changes in the rate of interest.