Democratic Restoration and Economic Policy: Argentina 1984–91

Abstract

This chapter describes and analyses the complex problems, restrictions and challenges that Argentinean economic policy had to face from the end of 1983. At that time the military government installed by Videla seven years earlier gave way to the democratic government led by Raúl Alfonsín. The study ends in 1992, when under the administration of Carlos Menem, and within the framework of a new stabilisation programme, the Convertibility Plan, the country reached a credit agreement with the commercial banking system, framed within the Brady Plan. The following analysis is based on several earlier studies, the formal details and econometric developments of which have been omitted here. Thus, though this history of the economy and economic policy of Argentina has been developed for the most part on models, the formal structure of these remains concealed behind the curtains, as it were, in order to make this chapter more accessible to the lay reader.