Argentina’s leader off to a good start

(Photo: Victor R. Caivano AP)

After spending a week in Argentina, I concluded that there are six reasons why President Mauricio Macri — who took office a month ago after 12 years of radical populist governments — is off to a very good start.

First, Macri’s center-right government has freed currency controls, a measure imposed by the previous government that had contributed to paralyzing the economy over the past four years. While many feared that lifting currency controls would unleash a massive flight to the dollar, drive up the price of the U.S. currency and make imports more expensive, it didn’t happen. On the contrary, the U.S. dollar was trading at about 14 pesos this week, below its price before Macri took office.

Second, Macri reduced and in some cases eliminated his predecessor Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s high taxes on agricultural exports. In recent years, Fernández’s export taxes — especially a 35 percent government levy on soybean exports — had led Argentina’s biggest agricultural exporters to move their operations to Uruguay, Paraguay and other neighboring countries. Now, many of them are vowing to return to Argentina.

Third, Macri has reshuffled the country’s discredited INDEC government statistics agency, which was used by the Kirchner government to systematically lie about the country’s real inflation and poverty rates.

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