Integración económica y localización de la actividad productiva: el caso del Mercosur

During the nineties, a surge of Regionalism took place and appeared the New Economic Geography, that centered on the study of the spatial consequences that this phenomenon involved. The theory mantains that the constitution of a custom union between countries with different sizes iniatilly induces a reduction in the geographical concentration of industries with increasing returns to scale at the biggest economy of the block and that this trend reverts later when the depth of integration exceeds certain critic level. Under the assumption that the firms belonging to given industries have similar propensities to trade across countries, the intrarregional intraindustry trade is like a mirror image for the localizational pattern of production; therefore, its relative importance would exhibit an opposite path, that is, in the first place it would increase and subsequentely it would decrease. On the other hand, the diminution of intraunion transaction costs could also cause changes in the spatial configuration of industries inside the integrating countries, specifically it could favor the industrial agglomeration at the regions with the biggest markets of these. The empiric evidence fully supports the results emerging from theoretical models. The establishment of Mercosur appeared to stimulate an increase in the bilateral intraindustry trade between Argentina and Brazil, in harmony with what is foreseeable in the former stages of integration and to help to perpetuate the regional concentration of industrial activity in our country. In the framework defined by the assumptions made in the theoretical analysis, the dynamics of the economic geography in the block could result in an increasing divergence of welfare levels. It´s evident that the growth of these disparities could prejudice the future viability of the process. In particular, if the ones who have the responsability of policymaking cares about the relative welfare, it could be beared out the instrumentation of a regional-sectoral policy.