Article • Dean Baker’s Beat the Press
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My colleagues at CEPR, Mark Weisbrot and David Rosnick gave me grief for saying that Argentina’s economy shrank in the year following its default. Actually, Argentina’s economy shrank in the first quarter of 2002, the quarter immediately following the December default, and then began growing robustly. It continued to have robust growth for 5 more years until it got caught up in the world recession. If we were having an honest debate over Greece, then everyone would be talking about Argentina’s remarkable turnaround. Instead, we have experts telling us that the economy shrank 20 percent following the default.