Mercedes Botto Andrea Carla Bianculli - Flacso

nature; in this case, research is used to face complex policy issues in a context of high uncertainty.
Finally, research as argumentation, is used by either policy-makers and/or interest groups may draw
on this research to assume an advocacy position. Once again we are dealing with ideal types [Tussie,
2006], but in order to apprehend the concrete academic-policy relationship, it is worth
decomposing these three categories and see how research has contributed to these episodes of
policy change.
Assuming that research is only one of the many competing sources of information policy-makers
can make use of, and one of the various factors that affect the final policy decision [Tussie, 2006;
Garrett and Islam, 1998], our paper argues that the availability of research and ideas does not
directly translate into policy change. In other words, the research-policy link is not a direct one, and
ideas only influence policy decisions under certain circumstances. Under what circumstances does
availability of knowledge lead to policy change? Following this line of argumentation, we define
policy influence as the result of a process along which three conditions must be present. To the
availability of research or the “production of knowledge”, we must add two other conditions: its
articulation with the stakeholders and mainly with decision makers, and finally, its edition and the
political will of decision makers to make use of it. In other words, in order to capture under what
circumstances research influences the trade policy-making process, understanding how the
production of research and the policy process interact in a particular context turns out to be of
salience.
Building on the current debate regarding the nexus between research and policy-making, and the
factors that contribute to this relationship, we will analyze two key moments within the Mercado
Común del Sur (Mercosur) and the integration process initially launched by Argentina and Brazil:
the CGP, signed within the PICE in 1987, and the CET established in 1994.
2. SETTING THE CONTEXT
After decades of protectionism and of import-substitution policies, most Latin American countries
(LACs) began to open up to the rest of the world in the late 1980s. Different factors converge to
explain this situation: the debt crisis of 1982, dissatisfaction with the results of import-substitution
strategies, and the acknowledgement that the effects on resource allocation of trade policies
characterized by high and dispersed import tariffs, widespread use of quantitative restrictions and
other non-tariff barriers and granting multiple exemptions to import restrictions were no longer
clear. By 1987-1988, it was patent that a fundamental change was needed and that the long-standing
protectionist trade policy could no longer be sustained. A process of trade reform and of reduction
of the levels of protection would then be launched across the region, and gain an accelerating pace.
The end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s marked a turning point in the nature of trade
policies for all LACs3. 3 Except for Chile, the only country which had launched a continuous process of trade liberalization since
1973, when the military coup led by Augusto Pinochet took over.
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