THE RECENT CRISIS AND RECOVERY OF THE ARGENTINE ECONOMY: SOME ELEMENTS AND BACKGROUND Arturo O’Connell Universidad de Buenos Aires and Università di Bologna a Buenos AiresT 1 Argentine-Australia Economic Conference Buenos Aires, April 2007 Draft version; not to be quoted without permission from the author

Introduction
The Argentine crisis could be examined as one more crisis of the developing countries – admittedly a star pupil that had received praise from many sides – hit by the vagaries of the international financial markets and/or its own policy mistakes. illumination. But it could even be more interesting to examine the peculiarities of the Argentine experience – always in that general context – which did add to the difficulties other economies have faced and that have made it such an intractable case for normal medication. And not only those peculiarities and their consequences should better been pinned down. But also an attempt should be made at understanding that they were not just a result of the extravagance of that far away people in one Southern end of the world. This paper is organized in the following way. In the first section a brief And to a great extent that is a line that could provide some

examination of some long-run trends in the Argentine economy is introduced. The next section is an attempt at a thorough examination of the performance of the Argentine economy in the 1990’s and the development of some severe imbalances eventually leading to an unsustainable situation. The following one, tries to explain the interaction among the various imbalances also as intensified by the peculiarities of the Argentine economic-institutional setup. The final section, is a brief description of the major events over the first half of year 2002 and the unresolved problems that stand in the way of a recovery and return to some normal economic and political