Guest blog by Andrés Michel, LEG ’24
Understanding Córdoba’s Regional Disparities
The province of Córdoba is located in the heart of Argentina. It spans an area of 165,000 square kilometers and is home to nearly 4 million people. Córdoba stands out for its exceptionally fertile lands, contributing almost 30% of the nation’s soybean and corn production and an impressive 90% of its peanut output1. Building on this foundation, the province has diversified its productive structure into related industries such as agricultural machinery manufacturing and biofuels production, among others. However, Córdoba’s economic wealth extends beyond the agri-food value chains. In the metropolitan area of the provincial capital—home to 2 million people—prominent industrial clusters thrive, including the automotive sector and others linked to the knowledge economy, such as the pharmaceutical, aerospace, and software industries.
Despite these economic strengths, Córdoba’s per capita GDP remains aligned with the national average, standing at approximately USD 13,000. Why does a province with such high-productivity sectors exhibit such modest differentiation from the national average? Our policy hypothesis attributes this to regional disparities within Córdoba.
While the southern region excels in agri-industrial value chains and the metropolitan area specializes in knowledge-intensive goods and services, the northern region has historically lagged in its development. This area accounts for 28% of the province’s territory but houses only 7% of its population, resulting in a population density just one-fourth that of the rest of the province. There are only 9 firms per 1,000 inhabitants in the northern region, compared to 14 in the rest of the province. Furthermore, these firms tend to be smaller: businesses in the northern region employ an average of 7 formal workers, compared to 10 in other areas. Consequently, only 7% of individuals aged 18 and older in the northern region have formal private-sector employment, compared to 14% in the rest of the province. These structural differences have perpetuated a significant gap in social indicators between the region and the rest of the province.
Historically, public policies aimed at addressing these disparities have focused primarily on social interventions, sidelining productive development. For our administration, achieving sustainable development in the northern region is a priority. We aim to anchor this development in productive investments that leverage the region’s comparative advantages and generate genuine, high-quality employment opportunities.
In this blog, I will share how the Leading Economic Growth course at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) has guided us in designing the actions needed to achieve this objective.
A Hidden Region
One of the main lessons from the Leading Economic Growth course is that development is a team effort, extending far beyond formal government organizational charts. I currently serve as Secretary of Economic Policy in the Ministry of Economy of the provincial government, where my role is to plan government actions to fulfill the Governor’s mission of creating genuine jobs in the northern region. Our implementing partner is the Competitiveness Agency (CA)2, a new entity born out of public-private collaboration to improve competitiveness across the entire province.
The CA plays a pivotal role as it is envisioned to become what the course describes as a “high-bandwidth organization.” Its mandate is to coordinate actions across ministries in response to interactions with public and private actors in the region.
For years, numerous assessments of the northern region’s development gaps have been conducted by various stakeholders. These reports became key inputs for policy dialogues3 in the region, enabling us to identify, together with local stakeholders, the most pressing constraints and the actions likely to yield the highest returns in the shortest time. This collaborative effort is essential for building a legitimate roadmap that aligns with the reality we seek to transform.
Through these interactions, we were able to refine our development challenge: the northern region attracts very little private investment. We discovered several pioneering ventures taking advantage of the region’s comparative advantages. Entrepreneurs from other parts of the province or the country have invested in high-value-added tourism projects or leveraged the agroecological conditions of the northern highlands for cultivating vineyards and olives. In every case, these entrepreneurs have asked the government to help bring in more competitors to strengthen the ecosystem and collaborate on providing strategic public goods needed to scale operations.
In other words, the region has received investments that demonstrate its comparative advantages, but these initiatives have not yet scaled. Why? Using a fishbone diagram analysis, we identified several answers to this question, but one “main obstacle” stood out: potential investors are unaware of the region and, even less so, of the business opportunities it offers.
Given the region’s starting conditions, investments from the rest of the province and the country are critical—not only for their financial impact but also because they serve as a gateway to introducing new knowledge into the region. How can we ensure that the northern region’s productive opportunities stop being a hidden secret in its highlands?
Unveiling the Productive Potential of Northern Córdoba
They say that to get noticed, you need to make some noise. To showcase the productive opportunities of northern Córdoba, we need to pursue several simultaneous actions that not only make these opportunities visible but also build the capacity to coordinate efforts toward our development goals.
Following the recommendations from the HKS course, we identified entry points—those actions with the highest probability of success and the greatest returns. One such entry point is the tourism sector. Northern Córdoba boasts stunning landscapes, with rivers and mountains that naturally lend themselves to tourism-related activities. However, these ventures have historically lacked coordination. Within the same tourist corridor, entrepreneurs engaged in complementary activities had never even sat at the same table.
The CA organized on-the-ground workshops inspired by Piero Ghezzi’s executive roundtables in Peru and the legitimacy-building approach emphasized in the HKS course. The goal was to coordinate actors, both private and public, to agree on a shared diagnosis and define actions to strengthen tourist corridors. In the tourism sector, visibility is crucial—not only to attract investments but also to market the product (drawing tourists). These workshops were widely shared on social media to ensure the engagement and commitment of participants4.
In addition to tourism, other initiatives aim to address information gaps regarding the region’s productive opportunities. One such initiative is a mapping tool5 that provides detailed agro-climatic conditions, useful not only for investments in agribusiness value chains but also for renewable energy projects.
Scaling and Institutionalizing: The Regional Competitiveness
The experience in the tourism sector holds significant demonstrative value. It sends an outward signal: Córdoba is committed to elevating the quality of its economic activities in the northern region. But also, it delivers an internal message: coordination is not only possible, it is essential for achieving meaningful and legitimate actions.
This experience, along with productive dialogue forums and various public goods projects aimed at addressing information gaps, will be scaled into a robust institutional framework within the CA structure. CA will focus on improving competitiveness in other regions of the province, but the success of the northern region will be pivotal in proving that productive policies have the power to transform lives by creating new jobs and improving living conditions. This way, we expect to make CA a truly high bandwidth organization for every corner in the province territory.
This approach will have dedicated Project Managers to oversee all initiatives contributing to overcoming the northern region’s main development barrier: demonstrating to the rest of the province, the country, and the world that behind its mountains lie productive opportunities waiting to be seized. Córdoba is ready to collaborate with investors to transform these opportunities into tangible businesses that benefit all its citizens.
This is a blog series written by the alumni of the Leading Economic Growth Executive Education Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. 47 Participants successfully completed this 10-week online course in December 2024. These are their learning journey stories.