Foreign and Domestic Investment in Argentina The Politics of Privatized Infrastructure

Political economy scholarship suggests that private sector investment, and thus economic growth, is more likely to occur when formal institutions allow states to provide investors with credible commitments to protect property rights. This book argues that this maxim does not hold for infrastructure privatization programs. Rather, differences in firm organizational structure better explain the viability of privatization contracts in weak institutional environments. Domestic investors - or, if contracts are granted subnationally, domestic investors with diverse holdings in their contract jurisdiction - work most effectively in the volatile economic and political environments of the developing world. They are able to negotiate mutually beneficial adaptations to their contracts with host governments because cross-sector diversification provides them with informal contractual supports. The book finds strong empirical support for this argument through an analysis of fourteen water and sanitation privatization contracts in Argentina and a statistical analysis of sector trends in developing countries.

Introduction; 1. Informal contractual supports in weak institutional environments; 2. An overview of the Argentine privatizations; 3. The fragility of nonlocal contracts prior to the crisis; 4. Smoother sailing for all investors in less competitive provinces; 5. Home court advantages magnify after the crisis; 6. Diverse local holdings also prevail in calm political contexts; 7. Explaining contractual resilience in low- and middle-income countries; 8. Conclusion.

Alison E. Post is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining the Berkeley faculty, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, a Visiting Researcher at the Centro de Estudios de Estado y Sociedad in Buenos Aires and the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean in Santiago, and a Researcher at the London School of Urban Research in London. Her doctoral dissertation won the 2009 William Anderson award from the American Political Science Association for the best dissertation in the general field of federalism, intergovernmental relations, state or local politics.