Macri may reboot Argentina

(Photo: Ricardo Mazalan AP)

Argentina’s President-elect Mauricio Macri will inherit a bankrupt country that hasn’t grown for the past three years and is pretty much isolated from the global economy, but there are four major reasons why he could succeed in bringing Argentina back on its feet.

First, Macri’s election as his country’s first pro-business leader in several years and the fact that Argentina will be the first big South American country to veer back to the center after more than a decade of leftist populism, is already generating excitement in business circles.

Macri, an engineer who will lead a country long-ruled by lawyers, has said that one of his first priorities after taking office Dec. 10 will be restoring business confidence.

Despite Argentina’s booming economy in the 2000s thanks to record world commodity prices, populist policies by outgoing President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner scared away investments. Fernández’s widespread — but unsustainable — social subsidies and her systematic lying about Argentina’s true inflation statistics had generated near unanimous skepticism about Argentina in world markets.

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