What can we learn from the current crisis in Argentina?

Timothy J. Kehoe ()

No 318, Staff Report from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Abstract: Currently, Argentina is experiencing what the government describes as a "great depression." Using the "Great Depressions" methodology developed by Cole and Ohanian (1999) and Kehoe and Prescott (2002), we find that the primary determinants of both the boom in Argentina in the 1990s and the subsequent depression were changes in productivity, rather than changes in factor inputs. The timing of events links the boom to the currency-board-like Convertibility Plan and the crisis to its collapse. To gain credibility, the Argentine government took measures to make abandoning the plan more costly. Because the government was unable to enforce fiscal discipline, however, these increased costs failed to make the plan more credible and instead made the crisis far worse when it failed.

Keywords: Argentina; Monetary policy - Argentina (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-fin, nep-ifn, nep-lam and nep-rmg
Date: 2003
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Published in Scottish Journal of Political Economy> (Vol. 50, No. 5, November 2003, pp. 609-633)

Downloads: (external link)
http://minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr318.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: What Can We Learn from the Current Crisis in Argentina? (2003)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedmsr:318

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/pubs/

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Report from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Diane Rosenberger ().