Hacker News Reader

Comment by randomdata | Hacker News Reader

> Argentina has been in recession for more than a decade.

To the rest of us layman not familiar with your language, they just entered into a recession earlier this year[1]. And on behalf of us laymen, we'd love to know more about the etymology and context of your use of "more than a decade". To the rest of us, that normally means 10s of years, not mere months.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-jobless-rat...

View on HN

Well, nominal GDP was US $642.5b in 2015 and they haven't recovered yet. And if you measure real gdp (not nominal), even worse. What do you call having lower GDP year after year? I call it recession.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Argentina

How is that US$642.5b calculated? IIRC in 2015 we had at least two values for the dollar/pesos ratio. The official one was like 10AR$/US$, but you could buy a small amount of dollars at that value. And the street value (so called "blue dolar") was like 15AR$/US$. So which one was used? It's like a 50% difference.

(Now we had like 10 definitions of the dollar/pesos ratio. The official one is 950AR$/US$ but it's almost imposible to buy at that price. To buy dollars, the prices are around 1300AR$/US$ or 1500AR$/US$ depending on the day of the week.)

I just used the data available in Wikipedia. Instead, if we go to official data from Argentina's INDEC (national institute of statistics) we get a more reliable picture. Here [1] we see they show annual GDP (called PIB in Spanish) in constant prices of 2004 (so, they correct it by inflation). In page 6 you can see this image [2], where you see that yes, GDP hasn't really grown at all since 2011 (which is more than a decade ago). And this is aggregate GDP, but population has grown, so GDP per capita has gone down.

[1] https://www.indec.gob.ar/uploads/informesdeprensa/pib_06_242... [2] https://i.imgur.com/f0pIiFE.png

In 2015 the situation of the INDEC was strange, the inflation was underestimated [1] and also the dollar/peso ratio was fictional. So take all that numbers with a grain of salt. However I agree that there is (almost) no gro in the GDP in a long time. [2]

[1] Comparison of the official inflation rate and the unofficial one published by the oposition in the congress: https://economictrends.com.ar/2015/01/16/economia-en-1-grafi...

[2] Anyway, I remember 2015 was a good year, we had a huge soy harvest and the international price was very high.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com