30 The Americas The EconomistOctober 5th 2019
2Bello Crises past and present
O
n calle florida, in the centre of
Buenos Aires, the money-changers
are back, offering dollars at a black-
market exchange rate. In the villas mi-
serias(shantytowns) on the periphery of
the metropolis, demand for food hand-
outs at comedores(soup kitchens) has
risen sharply, prompting congress to
approve emergency food aid. Poverty
now afflicts 35% of Argentines, up from
27% in January-June 2018, say official
figures. Even the solidly middle-class
districts in a city of slowly fading gran-
deur are feeling the pinch. “Before, local
people helped more,” says Sister Norma
Arronda, who runs the Madre Camila
comedorin Recoleta, which helps the
homeless in late middle-age. “Now we
get fewer donations.”
For the sixth time since the 1980s,
Argentina is suffering an economic
crisis. Memories are still fresh of the
collapse of 2001-02, when after a slump
the country defaulted on its debts, sav-
ings were frozen, the economy contract-
ed by 15% and the poverty rate reached
56%. In many ways this crisis is less
severe and easier to escape. But in others
it is more challenging.
It began last year when investors
jibbed at continuing to finance the pro-
market but fiscally lax government of
Mauricio Macri, prompting a run on the
peso. After the imfstepped in with a
$57bn loan, the biggest in its history,
things seemed to stabilise. But with
inflation at over 50%, real wages falling
and the economy in recession, Mr Ma-
cri’s chances of winning a second term in
an election on October 27th waned.
In simultaneous primaries on August
11th, he won only 32% of the vote. A Pero-
nist slate headed by Alberto Fernández,
whose running mate is Cristina Fernán-
dez (no relation), a populist formerpresident, won 48%. The prospect of Ms
Fernández returning to high office, even if
only as vice-president, prompted panic.
The peso has fallen by 25% against the
dollar since August 11th. Faced with politi-
cal limbo, the imfhas suspended dis-
bursements. To alleviate the pain, Mr
Macri has reluctantly imposed exchange
controls, export taxes and price freezes
and offered electricity subsidies.
Mr Macri’s people insist they still have a
chance, because turnout will rise and
because of fear of a return to leftist popu-
lism. But most insiders in Buenos Aires
assume the Fernándezes will win. The big
question is what sort of government
would emerge. Some fear the worst, with
hyperinflation and the expropriation of
savings. But Mr Fernández is a pragmatist
and a skilled political operator. He has
been sounding increasingly moderate.
He has little choice. “Argentina has
exhausted its credit,” says a former official
whom Mr Fernández consults. “We finally
have to face reality.” Many economists
think that requires a comprehensive plan
to bring down inflation and generate fiscaland external surpluses. A new imfagree-
ment and the restructuring of private
debt are inevitable.
“Exporting more is the only way to get
dollars,” Mr Fernández told a business
audience last month, saying that neither
controls nor debt were solutions. His
advisers talk, too, of a social pact that
would freeze wages, prices, pensions and
utility tariffs for at least six months. That
is a way of finessing the indexation of
pensions to past inflation, for which the
government will lack the money.
Argentina’s macroeconomic plight is
less severe than in 2002. The banks are
sound. After a belated fiscal squeeze this
year, the fiscal deficit will be about 4% of
gdp(compared with 6.3%). The recession
is shallower and the peso is not wildly
overvalued as it was back then. The imf
is more flexible, partly because of the
opprobrium it attracted last time. “I
think the politicians are a bit more re-
sponsible now,” says Daniel Marx, who
was the finance secretary in 2001.
He worries less about Mr Fernández’s
intentions than about whether the new
government’s economic plan will be
sweeping enough and competently
executed. If all goes well, the recession
could end within a year.
But in some ways, Argentina is worse
off than it was at the beginning of the
century. Decades of economic stop-
and-go have turned into stagnation since- This is partly because so many
people now live, one way or another, off
the state. Despite Mr Macri, the economy
remains over-protected and many busi-
nesses are cheerfully uncompetitive. “It’s
sad to see Argentina like this,” says Sister
Norma. “We have the memory of our
parents and grandparents who worked
hard and made progress. We lost the idea
of work and of values.”
Argentina’s difficult road to redemptionyoung Inuit text and email mainly in Eng-
lish, says Crystal Martin-Lapenskie of the
National Inuit Youth Council.
On September 26th Inuit Tapiriit Kana-
tami, the national Inuit organisation, de-
cided to mitigate these difficulties by
adopting a unified writing system. Inuktut
Qaliujaaqpait will use combinations of ro-
man letters to represent the sounds in all
five dialects. It is a writing system created
by Inuit for Inuit, says Natan Obed, the
group’s president.
Getting to this point was not easy, for
the Inuit aim for consensus. A task-forcetook eight years to achieve it. Elders who
grew up with syllabics fretted that the shift
to roman letters would erase part of their
culture. Linguists had to devise ways to dis-
tinguish between sounds, like different
ways of pronouncing “r”, without using
diacritics, which add an extra step in typ-
ing. The Inuit in Labrador, who use the ro-
man alphabet, were reluctant to replace
their capital “K” with the lower-case “q”
used elsewhere. Every sound had to be rep-
resented. There could be “no dialect left be-
hind”, says Michael Cook, a linguist who
worked on the project.The new writing system will “keep our
language strong”, says Ms Martin-Lapen-
skie, but the old ones will not disappear
quickly. The Nunatsiaq News, a newspaper
that circulates in the eastern Arctic, will
continue to use syllabics in its Inuktut text,
says its editor, Jim Bell. The governments
of Nunavut and of Canada, the newspaper’s
biggest advertisers, still want adverts set in
syllabics and in the roman orthography
now used for Inuinnaqtun, an official lan-
guage in the territory. Mr Bell “can foresee a
long transition period”. In the north,
change can come at a glacial pace. 7