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Dollar, stocks and the comparisons that the Government hides with Macri's economy but the figures reveal

2020-08-26T11:16:24.884Z


The performance of employment last year versus the current one and what can be expected from the impact of exchange controls on activity.


Ezequiel Burgo

08/26/2020 - 6:01

  • Clarín.com
  • Economy

That which the teachers teach the youngest children early on, not comparing pears with apples , in economics serves to apply from the simplest to the most complex problems. After all, comparisons are difficult.

The Government threw itself on its belly on Monday to make one of them and it went wrong. The Ministry of Labor tweeted a series of graphs comparing data from 2019 and 2020. “In the first 5 months of 2020, in labor terms, as a result of ATP and measures such as a ban on layoffs and double severance pay, Argentina managed to reduce employment registered is lower than that of 2019, under the previous administration ” .

Former Economy Minister Hernán Lacunza accused Labor of "adding confusion" with "fragmented data . " In other words, mixing pears with apples because the ministry did not take the universe of workers (it did not count informal or self-employed workers) and related different periods (quarters and years).

Total employment in 2019 increased according to Indec data. Even during the entire period of Mauricio Macri as Lacunza tweeted yesterday later. “Between 2016 and 2019 several things went wrong (inflation, growth). But in all the years there was net job creation. In the end, there were 1.2 million more jobs. Ok, it wasn't enough. Indec Source ” . Lacunza data include labor informality.

The interesting thing about the exchange between the Government and the former minister comes out when 2019 is analyzed in detail.

First, that year, the workers' wages lost 15% with inflation (always according to INDEC data). This has been basically due to the impact of the increase in the dollar that went from $ 38 to $ 64 and, probably, an important reason why Macri lost the elections.

Second, the counterpart to the drop in wages was that employment managed to sustain itself amid a fierce recession and uncertainty. And the same in 2018. In economics it is said that when the exchange rate is flexible (as in 2015-2019), salaries adjust and the number of jobs does not suffer so much because company costs are cheaper in dollars. If, on the contrary, there is a fixed exchange rate, as happened in the crisis of Tequila or 2001 , unemployment explodes because the appreciation of the currency worsens the competitiveness of the firms and sustaining employment, it becomes more expensive.

And with the stocks, how are we doing? The dollar is flexible, so unemployment should not rise so much. "Avoid currency swings , " Lacunza explains about the stocks. "The impact will be seen more in the medium term because with this exchange scheme the firms do not invest . " According to a work by the economist Emmanuel Alvarez Agis where he analyzes the behavior of the Argentine economy under the stocks in two periods (1983/89 and 2011/15) it was characterized by stagnation : between 1983-9 the average annual variation of GDP was - 0.7% and between 2011-5 + 1.1% annually. What Alvarez Agis did is to compare pears with pears. Or apples to apples.

Source: clarin

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