Argentina - fastest growth on the planet but still faced with hard choices

[T]he growth rates for the first half of this year were truly astounding and leave the skeptics wondering when the long-awaited slowdown is going to come. Not only does the economy continue to grow but it is even picking up speed — while the growth rate for the first half of this year was 9.1 percent, the growth rate for the second quarter was 10.1 percent. With this momentum there seems no way this year’s growth can be below seven percent.

[...]

Yet Argentina seems to be running hard to stay in the same place. All this growth simply takes Argentina back to 1997 with the Gross Domestic Product now calculated at 313 billion pesos — just a few billion pesos less than eight years ago with the huge difference that pesos were then also worth dollars. Despite having virtually the fastest growth in the world, Argentina occupies at best a middle ranking as a place to do business.

[...]

With more investor-friendly attitudes, persuading the rest of the world to put its money into double-digit quarterly growth would be simplicity itself — a government could then indeed run on automatic pilot. But with its populist hostility towards investors, the government has managed to make the question of investment needlessly complex.

i disagree with the "needlessly" part... argentina has good reason to harbor suspicion of u.s.-style capitalism and foreign investment and even more reason to adopt the populist, center-left stance that has put them more aligned with hugo chavez' venezuela than with the u.s... the 2001 economic collapse, stemming in no small part from a lock-step approach to following imf dictates, was a huge and lasting shock to a country that was only beginning to shake off the horrible years of the "dirty war" and the nightmare of the "disappeareds..." argentina's a great country with some terrific people... i wish 'em the very best...

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