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International Conference - Lille, France (3-5 July 2019)

Envisioning the Economy of the Future, and the Future of Political Economy

Rethinking comparative sectoral analysis. The case of the consumer electronics industry in Argentina
Matías Agustín Sánchez  1@  
1 : Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) - Centro de Estudios sobre Población, Empleo y Desarrollo, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas, Universidad de Buenos Aires (CEPED-FCE-UBA)

In the context of the transformations in the global capital accumulation process that have occurred since the middle of the 20th century and consolidated towards the 1970s under the so-called New International Division of Labour -NIDL- (Fröbel, Heinrichs and Kreye, 1980), the analysis of the configuration of production at an international level was boosted by the introduction of a new set of dimensions. Among them, the specific aspects of productive activities and the sectoral implications of the technical change, for the explanation of differentiated national paths (Kaplinsky, 1989; Alcorta, 1999). In particular, the process of fragmentation and delocalisation of productive processes and the numerous links established between firms have been approached widely by the authors of the Global Value Chains -GVC- framework (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz, 1994; Gereffi, Humphrey and Sturgeon, 2005; Whittaker et al., 2010).

From the perspective of the general determinations of the global capital accumulation process, other authors have identified, as the axis around which the NDIT is shaped, the changes in the material aspects of the production process and the possibility of differentiation in the exploitation of the labour force, according to the type of productive attributes required for the performance of each stage of the labour-process (Iñigo Carrera, [2003]2013; Starosta, 2010; Grinberg, 2011; Charnock and Starosta, 2016). In this sense, the reference to the evolution of the world economy implies that technical changes in labour-organization will modify the capital accumulation potentiality of each national space (Charnock and Starosta, 2018).

On the basis of this approach, in this paper, we aim to propose a framework in which the dimensions of analysis usually set in motion for the comparative sectoral analysis are put together, considering the unity of the global capital accumulation process and its particular forms at the national scale. To support this objective, we will follow the case of the consumer electronics industry in Argentina, during the period 1975-2015, as a form of analysing the extent to which trends at an international level have implied transformations locally. This sector is strongly associated with the NIDL consolidation process due to the scope of relocation and differentiation of the labour force in the different productive phases (Keller, 1983; Snow, 1983; Ernst, 2005; Starosta, 2009; Sturgeon and Kawakami, 2010). As a result, links between an increasing number of firms and diversification of products have been established (Sturgeon and Kawakami, 2010). However, in Argentina, the sector experienced a deep reversion in its degree of integration and assumed particular forms of development, closely associated with the industrial policy (Nochteff, 1984; Filadoro 2007; Schorr and Porcelli, 2014; Sánchez, 2018).


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