Mario Damill

Las cuentas públicas y la crisis de la convertibilidad en argentina

Abstract En este trabajo se abordan dos tópicos centrales en las controversias acerca del régimen de convertibilidad establecido en la Argentina en 1991 y de su crisis, que alcanzó su desenlace a fines de 2001.

Crecimiento economico en america latina: experiencia reciente y perspectivas

En este trabajo se evaluan las perspectivas de crecimiento de seis paises latinoamericanos representativos, a la luz de su desempeno economico en los ultimos tiempos. Los paises analizados son: Argentina, Brasil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico y Venezuela. Se resume el desempeno de cada pais, particularmente el referido al ano 1992, junto con los problemas mas importantes que surgieron en cada caso en lo atinente a la politica economica. Luego se examina la experiencia reciente poniendo el acento en las perspectivas de desarrollo de estos paises para el mediano plazo. La organizacion del articulo es la siguiente: en la primera seccion se expone una sintesis de las tendencias generales presentes en America Latina en 1992; en la segunda se analizan en forma separada los casos de los seis paises mencionados, y en la tercera se ofrece un panorama comparativo sobre todos ellos.

The New Millennium Argentine Saga: From Crisis to Success and from Success to Failure

Argentina’s economic performance, since the beginning of the new millennium, has been an object of analysis and intense debate. This is not surprising. The period began with a severe financial and debt crisis. In December 2001, the government announced the largest default on public debt in global financial history. The economy had also sunk into a deep depression: GDP contracted by more than 20% compared to its previous peak in mid-1998, unemployment reached almost 22% of the labor force and half of the population became poor. Rather unexpectedly for most observers, the economy began a rapid and strong recovery in mid-2002, which then turned into rapid and strong economic growth. During this process, employment grew very fast, many tradable services, manufacturing and agricultural activities boomed and non-traditional exports expanded at an unseeing pace. The impact of the global financial crisis of 2008–09 was short-lived and not as severe as in other emerging markets. However, by late 2011, despite the very favorable external context of low interest rates and high terms of trade, the economy started to be constrained by the lack of foreign exchange. In early 2014, it finally faced a balance of payments crisis. As a result, inflation accelerated and output and employment contracted. The full resolution and consequences of this crisis are — at the time we write these lines — still to be seen.

An unlikely Phoenix: The recovery of Argentina’s monetary and financial system from its ashes in the 2000s and its lessons

ABSTRACT The study discusses the recovery of the Argentine financial system after the crisis of the so called convertibility regime of the 1990s. The Argentine macroeconomic regime established in 1991 and based on the hard peg of the peso to the dollar at a 1 to 1 parity ended in a multiple crisis in 2001–2. Beyond the default on the public debt, the crisis also involved the breakdown of the domestic financial system, and an almost complete isolation of the country from the international financial markets as a consequence of the default. Under such a deep crisis and the consequent uncertainty, the recovery of the solvency of the financial institutions was an almost insurmountable enterprise. However, with a gradualist approach (contrary to the advice of the International Monetary Fund) and a degree of “regulatory forbearance,” the financial and monetary authorities were able to recover the health of the financial system, which became much more resilient to shocks, even if its development has been very slow and, as a consequence, the contribution of domestic credit to the economic expansion of the 2000s can be considered almost negligible.

Democratic Restoration and Economic Policy: Argentina 1984–91

This chapter describes and analyses the complex problems, restrictions and challenges that Argentinean economic policy had to face from the end of 1983. At that time the military government installed by Videla seven years earlier gave way to the democratic government led by Raul Alfonsin. The study ends in 1992, when under the administration of Carlos Menem, and within the framework of a new stabilisation programme, the Convertibility Plan, the country reached a credit agreement with the commercial banking system, framed within the Brady Plan. The following analysis is based on several earlier studies, the formal details and econometric developments of which have been omitted here. Thus, though this history of the economy and economic policy of Argentina has been developed for the most part on models, the formal structure of these remains concealed behind the curtains, as it were, in order to make this chapter more accessible to the lay reader.