We think up, design, and evaluate productive development policies (PDPs) that will strengthen Argentina’s economy, generate innovations, increase prosperity, and create more and better jobs, which are the first steps toward making the country’s volatile economic cycles a thing of the past.

PDPs should be an essential part of Argentina’s development strategy, boosting exports while also creating jobs. In countries that are stuck in the middle-income trap, as is the case for Argentina, PDPs are essential to overcoming relative stagnation and moving resources from low-productivity activities to more dynamic ones, which helps build comparative advantages.

We encourage stakeholders to approach PDPs by acknowledging the high levels of uncertainty they entail and accepting that they imply complex trade-offs using scarce resources. Given this, we need to prioritize a capacity-building agenda for the state and create an appropriate institutional architecture for designing, implementing, and evaluating PDPs.

Crafting a development strategy without PDPs is impossible. But at the same time, PDPs will not be viable without a strategy to improve coordination between the public and private stakeholders involved in this policy arena, specific mechanisms to enhance learning processes within the state, and new ways of using local and international evidence before and after policies are implemented.

What sets our approach to applied public policy research apart is that it is interdisciplinary, anchored in political economy, and uses methodological strategies that combine quantitative and qualitative analyses.