Argentina is going through a recession that will last "a while," Economy Minister Nicolás Dujovne acknowledged today in an interview with Radio La Red.
"There is something that is inevitable: we are going through a recession," he said, attributing the situation to "a series of events" that the country has faced this year.
Among these events, he cited the drought which heavily affected agricultural production, the source of Argentina's main export, as well as the "international volatility that led to the exit of funds from emerging countries."
He said the exodus of money from emerging markets had "hit us very hard because we had not really finished correcting the imbalances of our economy."
Dujovne also referred to what he called "the crisis of the notebooks," a reference to a giant corruption probe investigating the alleged payment of bribes for public works projects during the governments of Néstor and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Tens of business figureheads have been dragged into the investigation.
"These are not events that we can minimise and we have to coexist with the effects of the shocks that we have experienced," the minister said.
Argentina recently finalised a deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) worth US$57.1 billion in order to stabilise the economy, which is expected to contract by as much as 2.7 percent this year.
Dujovne acknowledged that "the Argentine economy is in recession," adding that "it will be in recession for a while."
"We know that we have tough months ahead, just as the months we have been through since April have been hard months," he said, "but we also know that without those measures they would have been much harder, [and] that we have managed to avoid a crisis."
"We are going through a recession that is hard and difficult," he added.
- AFP
Comments