The long decay of Argentina. Could the 2010s have been different?

A notorious thinker of the 19th century once said that "history repeats it- self, first as tragedy, second as farce". The 2010s were, for the Argentinean economy, a new lost decade. But unlike the 1980s, where the country had to go through a debt crisis, a ridiculous war and two stabilization plans (one of them including a substitution of the national currency, which only lasted six years) that ended in hyperinflation and massive social unrest, the high macroeconomic instability of the 2010s did not end in a major social crisis. After the peak registered in 2011, the per capita GDP has oscillated with a decreasing trend, being 10% lower in 2019 than it was ten years before. In line with the literature describing the contractionary effect of devaluations (Díaz-Alejandro 1963; Krugman and Taylor 1978), this downward trend of income seems to have been driven by the exchange rate devaluations that took place in 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2019. In parallel, the rate of inflation ex- hibited an accelerating trend that could only be contained when the nominal exchange rate was kept under control. This weak macroeconomic perfor- mance coincided with two antagonistic political regimes: while the second presidency of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2012–2015) attempted to establish a "social Keynesian" wage-led regime of accumulation, the admin- istration of Mauricio Macri (2016-2019) intended to lay the foundations of a finance-dominated accumulation regime similar to the ones observed in the Pacific countries of the region, with Chile as the role model.Fil: Valdecantos, Sebastián. Aalborg University Business School; Denmark