# **3 Results**

We use the 1997 input-output tables for the Argentine economy produced by the National Institute for Statistics and Census (INDEC), publicly available at the Institute’s official website. In particular, we have data for 124 production activities, corresponding to 17 sectors of economic activities, which can be in turn aggregated into 4 broad aggregates: Agriculture, Mining, Manufacturing and Services. Data is used at basic prices, that is, not including taxes net of subsidies, trade and transportation margins or customs expenditures. Table 1 summarizes our results for broad aggregates. As could be expected, manufacturing has the highest imported content at 18.45 percent of total exports, followed by agriculture, with 7.9 percent of imported content<sup>2</sup> . For the country as a whole, the imported intermediate content of total exports amounts to 14.46 percent of total exports (US$ 4.02 billion). This compares to 32.0 for Mexico in 1997, around one third for Ireland, Korea and Taiwan in 1990 and 19.8 for a group of 10 OECD countries in 1990 (see Hummels et al. 2001). For European countries in 1995, Breda et al. (2008) report 24.4 for Italy, 21.5 for Germany, 20.5 for France, 27.5 for Spain, 41.5 for Belgium and 33.8 for Netherlands.

Furthermore, Table 2 disaggregates the exercise into 17 sectors of economic activities3. Note that now it is ‘Postal and telecommunications services’ that follows manufacturing with 10.3 percent of imported content of exports, being the sector with the highest imported content as a share of exports in the ‘Services’ aggregate.

The 1997 input-output tables for Argentina also include data on imports and production at the product level for 195 groups of products4. Using this information, we first focus on the structure of imports for manufacturing sectors. It is informative to look at which products are imported by those sectors whose (indirect) import content is higher. Figure 1 shows manufacturing sectors ordered by their import content as a share of exports. ‘Motor vehicles’ is the manufacturing sector with a highest imported content (45.5 percent). For those manufacturing sectors which show an imported content above 25 percent, we present the ten most imported products, given by their share on each sector’s total imports. Table 3 presents the results. Two key features arise from inspecting Table 3. In the first place, imports are concentrated in a few products, as in all but one manufacturing sector the ten most imported products account for more than 90 percent of total imports. Secondly, as could be expected, the structure of these manufacturing sectors reflects a considerable amount of intra-industry trade. For instance, for the sector ‘Motor vehicles’ 25.0 and 22.1 percent of imports correspond to ‘Motor vehicles, trailer

> 2 Manufacturing is also the sector with the highest imported content for every country in the Breda et al. (2008) sample. However, for the countries in their study, manufacturing shows significantly higher values, that range from 23.7 for France to 49.9 for Belgium (all 1995 figures).

> 3 The disaggregation comes in the ‘services’ aggregate, which is broken down into 14 different sectors. 4 The “product” classification is being used quite arbitrarily here, as the 1997 input-output tables do not follow any international classification (or at least it is not indicated in the methodology report). In any case, it is the most disaggregated category presented in the 1997 input-output tables.

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