Models of regulation of natural gas public services in Argentina, 1967-2017

Abstract

In Argentina, the privatization of public service companies meant the passage from a model of regulation based on a state monopoly to another model of marginal economic eficiency, which, however, had a changing and contradictory course in the lastfive decades. The article aim is to analyze the marches and countermarched of the difierent regulatory models of the public service of residential natural gas distribution in Argentina between 1967 and 2017. From the revision of the regulatory legislation offive decades, the reconstruction of prices series of residential tarifis, and the evolution of the companies of the sector in the Argentine top business, it is examined the efiect of the institutional models and the determination of energy prices mechanisms on the tarifidynamics, the purchasing power of wages, and the sales of the companies in the sector.