Corporate Governance: an Introduction to the Argentine Case

The purpose of this paper is to provide with a preliminary analysis of corporate governance in Argentina. One of the particular features of the local scenario is that many of the most significant local firms have an important degree of ownership concentration. At the same time, this ownership is in the hands of families. The economic reform of the nineties created a significant transfer of ownership to foreign economic firms. In many cases, these corporations absorbed some traditional local firms while at the same time gained control of almost all of the privatized firms (telecommunications, water supply, electricity, gas, airlines, railroads and most recently the local oil corporation). Ten years ago, out of the top ten firms in Argentina, six were public owned enterprises.