Author/s: ABOAL, Diego; ALBRIEU, Ramiro; CORSO, Eduardo Ariel; FANELLI, José María; LANZILOTTA, Bibiana; LICHA, Antonio; LUPORINI, Viviane; PERERA, Marcelo
Year: 2009
The objective of this book is to present the results of the ?Fiscal Space for Growth in the Mercosur? project which was carried out by three research institutions belonging to MercoNet (CEDES, CINVE, and UFRJ). The main objective of the studies undertaken as part of the project was to evaluate the fiscal space for growth in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay from a regional and comparative perspective. In line with this objective, a large part of the effort was centered on studying the important changes to the fiscal plan that the Mercosur countries produced in this decade. The emphasis was on analyzing if these changes increased or decreased opportunities to generate ?fiscal space? for growth. Then using this evaluation as a base, and adopting a regional vision, the second question asked was whether the change in the size of the fiscal space ? in the case that there was a change ? opened up new opportunities for regional cooperation for growth, both in regards to cooperation restrictions and the benefits of cooperating.
The following relevant conclusions regarding the design of regional cooperation stand out. A strategy oriented to take advantage of the fiscal resources for growth in an efficient way should comply with four requirements: 1) select those alternatives that have high ?profitability? in terms of accelerating growth; 2) that this profitability depends on the exploitation of competitive advantages that are available for the region but not for each individual member; 3) that the initiatives generate interest groups at the regional level with incentives for defending policy continuity; 4) that the initiative provide policy instruments that are not available for members individually.
Additionally, regional cooperation policy design should take into account the need to act on the externalities that weaken innovation and auto-discovery activities and on the coordination failures that get in the way of the exploitation of economies of scale and agglomeration. Governments should promote consolidation of the national innovation systems but at the same time take into account complementation at the regional level and they should act on coordination failures, mostly in what is referred to as the construction of infrastructure and the facilitation of structural change in Mercosur.
This publication is available below (in Spanish)
