I read that article this morning after you posted it. I think the key points of that article are below and they are quite shocking! This will be painful but if Argentina is going to repair itself they MUST stop this nonsense.
Even by Latin American standards, Argentina is an outlier. Public spending is equivalent to 38% of GDP, more than the 35% regional average and well above the 24% seen in the country between 1993 and 2005, according to IMF data. Government jobs like the ones at Argentina’s train service have been the main driver of overspending since the mid 2000s, according to an
analysis by economist Milagros Gismondi.
“There isn’t a real consciousness that you have to lower spending in Argentina,” says Gismondi, who was chief of staff at the economy ministry in 2019. “It’s not normal to operate with more train employees than in the United States,” she adds, and unless Argentines understand that’s not sustainable “we’ll continue from one crisis to another.”
Argentina’s state spending spree goes far beyond its railways, though. Governments have added nearly a million jobs to the public payroll since 2012, three times the gains seen in the private sector, labor ministry data show. Welfare has also ballooned. The number of social security recipients who haven’t contributed to the system spiked above 5 million in 2020 from just 172,000 in 2002, according to a
report by Andres Schipani at CIAS, a university think tank.
