Argentine Economy

Abstract

After the Congress elected Eduardo Duhalde as the new president of Argentina in 2002, the economy started suffering very deep changes that would shape the economic, social and cultural aspects of the country in the upcoming decades. Duhalde had been governor of Buenos Aires Province up to 1999, when he ran for the presidency and lost against Fernando de la Rúa. He was a well-known politician, leader of one faction of the Peronist Party and a popular figure among the lower and middle urban classes. This group had suffered the hardest hit due to the policies implemented during the 1990s, as unemployment rose, social spending was frozen and the poverty rate increased in the last years of the convertibility regime.