08/22/2021 19:03
Clarín.com
Economy
Updated 08/22/2021 7:03 PM
The Argentine economy has long become accustomed to living in a context of restrictions on dollarization.
If the first regulations made by the AFIP in 2011 to control access to the dollar during the last government of Cristina Kirchner are taken into account, the
country has been operating under an exchange rate for almost a decade.
And
economists do not see that the situation can normalize in the coming years.
A report by the consulting firm Ecolatina analyzed the scenarios prior to the introduction of exchange traps, both the one that arrived during the presidency of Cristina Kirchner and that marked the period from 2011-2015, and the one that began to take shape at the end of the government of Mauricio Macri in 2019 and is still in force today. And he found that in
the last ten years, in two out of every three months, Argentines had some obstacle to access the US currency.
Ecolatina took into
account four variables
to measure the performance of each of these periods:
the competitiveness of the real exchange rate, the Central Bank reserves, the exchange gap and the appreciation of the peso
in both cases. And this helped him to analyze that
the cost of disarming the current exchange restrictions is higher today than at the end of 2015.
Whereas
the first stocks of this decade occurred with an economy that grew at 8%
in the two previous years but with the twin surpluses that lost momentum, acceleration in prices and a fall in the competitiveness of the real exchange rate
; the "ultra-hard" version of 2019 came after two consecutive years of recession
, with a more competitive exchange rate than in 2011 but with
40% less reserves in the Central Bank.
The study detailed that
from 2011 to 2015, the real exchange rate lost 34% of its competitiveness
, but that the current account gave negative results throughout that period. But the current stocks presents worse results than its predecessor: in the 2011-2015 period, foreign direct investment fell 54%,
it plummeted 76% in the last twelve months.
In turn, "while since the 2011 stocks were imposed, the Central Bank bought more than US $ 9,000 million in the first 24 months of validity, it barely bought US $ 1,000 million in the first 2 years of the current stocks," he said. The report. At the same time
, the exchange rate gap in 2011 -2015 was 43%, with a monthly peak of 77%;
while in the current stocks, the gap is around 62% and reached 150% in October of last year.
One of the reasons that worsens the chances of releasing the stocks in the coming years is the
level of indebtedness in dollars
: while at the end of 2015 there were a total of scheduled maturities in dollars for US $ 12,000 million for the following year, currently These
payments
are expected to
exceed $ 31 billion in 2022
.
And without an agreement with the Monetary Fund in sight and with the country risk at levels of 1,600 points, Argentina will have to face this without support from external markets.
Furthermore, Ecolatina noted that "freeing up access to the exchange market could lead to very high values of the dollar, which a priori do not seem necessary in terms of competitiveness."
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