Foreign direct investment and firms'strategies in Argentina in the 1920s
Maria Ines Barbero
Prof.
Universidad de Buenos Aires and Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento,
Argentina
Abstract:
At the end of WWI started an important flow of foreign direct investment in Argentina, headed by American multinationals, followed by European companies. This process of FDI took place in a local context of expansion and modernization of the industrial sector, to which foreign companies made a crucial contribution.
The aim of this paper is to analize the FDI with an approach focused on the strategies of the firms and their different forms of production in the local market, and to evaluate the impact of the FDI in the local industry. The question that underlines the research is in what extent the industrial boom of the 1920s in Argentina is due to the action of MNs and to the transfer of foreign technology in production and management.
Te paper will study, at first, the activities in which MNs operated, and the patterns assumed by their investments, from commercial branches to the complete production of goods, including different options as the assembly of imported parts or the contractual relationship with local firms to manufacture under the direction of foreign companies.
A second issue is the study of the transfer of technology - in a large sense of the term -, with the purpose of evaluating to what extent a diffusion of americanism took part and new forms of organizing production, work and management were extended.
A third subject are the commercial strategies of the firms and the creation of a market through advertising and the diffusion of new consumption patterns in the local population, as another form of cultural influence of FDI.
Key Words: Industrialization, technological transfer and foreign investment in Argentina in the 1920s
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