Dolarización - La última oportunidad de estabilidad monetaria en Argentina
Ese es el título de una reciente columna de Steven B. Kamin en el American Enterprise Institute.
I am hardly on board with many of the more extreme proposals that radical libertarian Javier Milei aired in the runup to his election as president of Argentina, but I do believe that dollarization—replacing the peso with the dollar as Argentina’s official currency—would be an important step toward economic stability. Argentine inflation is running at over 140 percent; it is in default and unable to repay its external creditors; and the economy is set to enter a steep recession. More to the point, Argentina has been lurching in and out of recession, hyperinflation, financial crisis, and default for the past four decades. The reasons for this boil down to persistent, large fiscal deficits financed by some combination of borrowing from foreigners and printing money.
There are very few can’t-miss fixes in macroeconomics, but when it comes to suppressing inflation, dollarization is one of them. After Ecuador dollarized in 2000 following a decade of high inflation, its inflation rate fell to about four percent, on average, compared with 40 percent in the 1990s. In El Salvador, which dollarized in 2001 after having already reduced inflation through a pegged exchange rate, has also managed to keep inflation down. Panama has used the dollar since its creation in 1904, and has generally had among the lowest inflation rates in the region.