Thursday, November 1, 2007

Argentina's Recovery Confounds "Washington Consensus"

This story from Mark Weisbrot on Znet describes the causes of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (Argentina's first elected woman president)'s electoral victory as being rooted in the "pro-Argentina" economic policies of her party.

I have a couple of reservations about the article: 1) This economic growth was more like a recovery from an artificially low starting point, 2) The IMF "oversaw" but did not really approve of the dollarization of the Argentinian currency that proved so disastrous.

But the important point remains true: Following the discrediting of the dollarization policy, Argentina defaulted on foreign creditors and rejected IMF austerity policies and have managed to emerge from a financial crisis far more quickly, and with far more price stability, than the conventional wisdom would have predicted.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

(a) Check the price of oil lately?

(b) It's always a more efficient economy when you remove peoples' fundamental human rights.