Реферат: Argentina /english/

ARGENTINA

Argentina has experienced slow economic growth since the 1940s.
By the mid-1970s long-term growth declined noticeably, and in
the last half of the 1980s the country suffered its longest
period of stagnation in the century. Savings and investment
rates fell precipitously from the mid-1970s until 1989.
Argentines, responding to the unstable macroeconomic
environment, increasingly saved and invested abroad. Labor
productivity fell ang poverty worsened. This economic
performance was tranceable to chronic public sector deficits and
endemic inflation. Public sector deficits in the late 1970s
ranged from 10 to 14 percent of GDP, and in the early 1980s
surpassed IS percent of GDP. After the return to constitutional
democracy in 1983, public demands to control inflation were
translated into four successive stabilization programs. All
failed to eradicate inflation, and each ended in a more virulent
inflation than the one preceding it. The main reason for these
failures was the inability of the stabilization programs to
redress rapidly and permanently the public sector structural
deficit. Structural deficits emerged from the post-war
organization of the economy. Economic policy from the 1940s was
used to propagate rules and transfers favoring the interests of
private groups with access to power. By the early 1980s public
expenditures approached 40 percent of GDP. Unionized labor
benefitted from high wages, guaranteed employment, and rigid
rules governing hiring and dismissals. Industry benefitted from
highly protected markets, tax exemptions through special
promotion regimes, subsidized credit-or effective grants, as
many loans were not collected-subsidized inputs from public
enterprises, and high prices on sales to public enterprises.
Housing contractors and middleclass home buyers benefitted from
enormous public transfers through earmarked taxes and effective
grants through the Housing Bank.