What exactly is wrong with Argentina?

I get the middle income trap argument but that doesn't explain the budget deficits and inflation(second only to Venezuela). It has only 42 million population, has large agricultural land, huge land mass for industries etc etc... There is something wrong with people's level to make such a country go broke. So do anyone have any idea?

Rampant corruption, it's a major problem in developing and underdeveloped nations AKA third world countries.

Basically it comes down to nearly 100 years of weakening institutions. Since the 1930 coup we have been in a cycle of either dictatorship or populist democracy. The few times we managed to get a non-populist democratic leader elected they were never able to finish their term. As a result, we have become less educated, our judicial system has become a joke, we have defaulted on our debt something like 8 times, have an economic crisis every decade, etc.

Here is a good economist article about it, I'd be happy to answer any deeper questions you may have after:

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21596515-there-are-lessons-many-governments-one-countrys-100-years-decline-parable

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21596582-one-hundred-years-ago-argentina-was-future-what-went-wrong-century-decline

Things are looking up now, this is a chat our current finance minister gave at Columbia University. He just won the award for best finance minister in the world:



If the new government accomplishes just half of what they set out to do and manages to actually finish their term in office it will be more than enough for me.

BarrileteCosmico wrote:Basically it comes down to nearly 100 years of weakening institutions. Since the 1930 coup we have been in a cycle of either dictatorship or populist democracy. The few times we managed to get a non-populist democratic leader elected they were never able to finish their term. As a result, we have become less educated, our judicial system has become a joke, we have defaulted on our debt something like 8 times, have an economic crisis every decade, etc.

Here is a good economist article about it, I'd be happy to answer any deeper questions you may have after:

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21596515-there-are-lessons-many-governments-one-countrys-100-years-decline-parable

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21596582-one-hundred-years-ago-argentina-was-future-what-went-wrong-century-decline

Things are looking up now, this is a chat our current finance minister gave at Columbia University. He just won the award for best finance minister in the world:



If the new government accomplishes just half of what they set out to do and manages to actually finish their term in office it will be more than enough for me.

I don't understand what is meant by that and how it could be a problem. From my understanding, any democratic government would be able to do good for a nation, on a varying degree. Just by being a democratic (elected) government would be subjected to public scrutiny and would either perform or be swept away.

iftikhar wrote: I don't understand what is meant by that and how it could be a problem. From my understanding, any democratic government would be able to do good for a nation, on a varying degree. Just by being a democratic (elected) government would be subjected to public scrutiny and would either perform or be swept away.

Any democratic government being a good for nation is a wrong assumption imo. Just take Argentina for example a populist government will be good for the people in short term as they will get all the free bees and subsidies.While in long term it will destroy the economy with debt. Same thing happened in Greece.

Look at India, our industrialization is still a distant dream because all congress government took a bullshit agrarian stance and made laws that make it impossible for companies to acquire lands, made labour laws that made impossible for companies to fire, made no effort to bring good infrastructure to support any industry , made absolute mess not bringing uniform civil code..etc.

IT and software industry ,Only industry where government was unable to bring regulations and bullshit laws flourished and became massive in India.

As far as economy is concerned, Government, Decmocratic or Authoritarian need to steer clear it. Any government intervention stifles the economy.

BarrileteCosmico wrote:Basically it comes down to nearly 100 years of weakening institutions. Since the 1930 coup we have been in a cycle of either dictatorship or populist democracy. The few times we managed to get a non-populist democratic leader elected they were never able to finish their term. As a result, we have become less educated, our judicial system has become a joke, we have defaulted on our debt something like 8 times, have an economic crisis every decade, etc.

Here is a good economist article about it, I'd be happy to answer any deeper questions you may have after:

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21596515-there-are-lessons-many-governments-one-countrys-100-years-decline-parable

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21596582-one-hundred-years-ago-argentina-was-future-what-went-wrong-century-decline

Things are looking up now, this is a chat our current finance minister gave at Columbia University. He just won the award for best finance minister in the world:



If the new government accomplishes just half of what they set out to do and manages to actually finish their term in office it will be more than enough for me.

This is what happens when military intervenes. Democratic institutions needs to be set free to evolve into something bigger,it will take time but the wait is worth it in long term. Military coupes sets it back to square one.

Looks like Argentina got stuck in commodity export just like Brazil. It would work back in the day but not anymore. Need to make finished goods back home.Is there any effort to set up Automobile,Electronics,Software industries in Argentina ?

That's the point of having a democracy, isn't it???

You can change for the better. You can rectify past mistakes. I would assume, correct me if I'm wrong, the reason Modi/BJP came to power is due to his/their more market oriented policies that promises more growth and jobs.

Without a democratic system India would have been trapped in a Congress-led 80sque economy. Though the Rao government initiated the liberalization in early/mid 90s they were pretty tentative. CPM/LF ruled West Bengal for nearly four decades as they ensured some reforms that benefited (mostly) the rural population. But as they failed to take it to the next level, TMC reduced the reds to rubble.

Yes, democracy gives a chance to redeem the system if it goes wrong. Democracy has its weakness though.

Modi is widely applauded for his free market vision, no wonder U.S is a lot closer to India than 5 years ago. Even then democracy holds him back. He tried to bring land acquisition law for industrialization but Congress saw this as an opportunity to make farmers against modi so he eventually cancelled the bill.

We have 60%of the population in agriculture and that is too much. They only makes 17% of GDP and they wonder why they are poor. Since most of the land is also agricultural land any land acquisition is going to be a problem. They do not understand that making new factories and moving them away from farming is the only way out of poverty.

Congress shamelessly tries to take advantage of every reforms blaming him of being biased against farmers. For them India has to stay as poor as possible to continue their family dynasty.

iftikhar wrote:I don't understand what is meant by that and how it could be a problem. From my understanding, any democratic government would be able to do good for a nation, on a varying degree. Just by being a democratic (elected) government would be subjected to public scrutiny and would either perform or be swept away.

I think you're making the mistake of assuming that voting alone is enough. If voting is not accompanied by respect for the rule of law, the division of powers, some degree of federalism, etc then the system will be taken advantage of. A strong democracy has institutions that will protect the democracy from becoming the "tyranny of the majority".

Argentina didn't have this for most of the last century. The effect was that things were good for a few years until a massive crisis due to either too much debt, inflation or both to pay for the good times, then the military would come in to achieve some control, and since they were super corrupt they would erode the institutions even further, eventually some democracy would come back and the process would repeat itself.

You can look at Venezuela right now for an actual parallel: Congress passed a bill to gather signatures for a referendum on removing Maduro, which Maduro just ended by executive decree in what everyone agrees was unconstitutional. Should Maduro be allowed to do whatever he wants because he was democratically elected?

BarrileteCosmico wrote:
You can look at Venezuela right now for an actual parallel: Congress passed a bill to gather signatures for a referendum on removing Maduro, which Maduro just ended by executive decree in what everyone agrees was unconstitutional. Should Maduro be allowed to do whatever he wants because he was democratically elected?

This^

Although the point should be made more about all the constitutional abuses from Chavez, not as much with Maduro. Maduro began acting as president without being elected, Chavez simply appointed him as a successor when he was dying so it was never about democracy. He acted as president after Chavez' death instead of the president of parliament (as dictates the law) and then came the elections.

BC wrote:I think you're making the mistake of assuming that voting alone is enough. If voting is not accompanied by respect for the rule of law, the division of powers, some degree of federalism, etc then the system will be taken advantage of. A strong democracy has institutions that will protect the democracy from becoming the "tyranny of the majority".

Agreed 100%. But only when you can cook-up an election (we have plenty and first-hand experience in this regard) you can have election that doesn't reflect the peoples' view and actually erodes the institutions.

Democracy is democracy, whether it's populist or whatever. It means free and fair voting. And when that happens rule of law, strengthening of institutions follow (otherwise they are voted out).

@BarrileteCosmico, what's your opinion/expectation about the new President?

Who is the AFUERA president? Looks like a werewolf who came in a time machine from the 70's. Stay safe BC.

He is undeniably entertaining though.

Ministry of education? AFUERA

Ministry of health? AFUERA

Ever since he got elected a lot of people here in the US have been reaching out to me with concern based on what they're reading in international media. What is often missing from these articles is that the choice was between Milei and the former minister of finance, who had been acting as de facto president (that's another story) for 1.5 years, and is one of the people most responsible for handing off the country with triple digit inflation, 6/10 children living in poverty, and 1/10 people going hungry every day.

We also have a crime problem because we refuse to arrest anyone. There was an engineer killed a few months ago during a theft, it turned out the murderer was detained 14 times before but never arrested. People felt completely hopeless about the future of the country.

So faced with this stark choice, I really think it's no wonder that 57% of us chose the madman.

That said, it's undeniable that he has a correct assessment of why Argentina is a failed country. We simply spend too much money that we don't have. We can't borrow because anyone with 2 braincells won't loan to us (excepting the IMF, who only loan us enough to pay them back what we already owe them). So we print the rest. And that caused one of the highest inflations in the world.

So here comes Milei and says hey we spend too much, we need to cut that asap. No one trusts the peso anymore, we need to adopt the dollar. We should actually send people to jail. And these are common sense messages that resonate with people.

He also says a lot of unhinged libertarian nonsense, like legalizing a market for organs, refusing to have diplomatic relations with China and Brazil because they're communists, giving everyone the right to bear arms, etc. But so far these haven't been anywhere in the agenda and he's backtracked on almost all of them.

Fwiw I didn't vote as I live abroad, but had I voted I would have chosen the candidate that finished 3rd in the election. In the runoff I would've chosen Milei. So he's not my first choice. But I'm hopeful that if he does half of what he promised he can turn things around. The real danger, to me, is that he does all of what he promised. But that seems hard as he only has a small minority in Congress.

BarrileteCosmico wrote:

Fwiw I didn't vote as I live abroad.

Bc? AFUERA

BarrileteCosmico wrote:giving everyone the right to bear arms, etc.

eh doesn't seem like a great idea with 160% inflation and most people living on the edge

Argentines have been living in the edge for a while. One of our best movies in recent times is a compilation called "savage tales" that tells 6 different stories of people that simply lose it. Totally captured our culture haha, and very entertaining

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3011894/

Think I'm boarding the AFUERA train tbh

You have 160% inflation in Serbia too that makes you fall for this populism ?

Mostly I just like how he say AFUERA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oprr2fngSY4

I thought I might interject for a moment or two to put some historical perspective on this. You kids are all too young to maybe understand this, except for the few Argentines here. Back in the early 1900s, the Argentine economy was the 7th largest in the world. Throughout that century, the government flipped flopped from left to right and back again. And most times there was severe and violent retribution.

I worked in Buenos Aires a lot in early 2000s and was there in the first financial crisis. I can say there was a lot of confusion. At times I felt completely safe walking throughout the city yet at times there was violence both during futbol games or celebrations as well as political demonstrations. Also from a business perspective, there was a lot of corruption.

Bottom line, I don’t think there is any difference now than there was historically.

Vibe wrote:Mostly I just like how he say AFUERA

probably got it from his lover boy Trump, "You're fired!"

I didn't know you worked in CABA bill. Your experience checks out. For what it's worth, while we feel unsafe these days, we are only at US levels of insecurity and amongst the best in the continent. Could still be a lot better tho

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fsomos-el-tercer-pa%25C3%25ADs-de-am%25C3%25A9rica-con-menos-ases1nat0s-v0-6jgr9o20d8bc1.jpeg%3Fs%3D2335dbe79fe002fd798e55d3651af04e76dbf140

Considering Milei wants to give everyone guns these numbers should grow exponentially is what I presume.