Although The head of the Palacio de Hacienda has already advanced in negotiations with Kristalina Georgieva in India, in the framework of the summit of finance ministers of the Group of 20, to make the goals of accumulation of international reserves more flexible, the fiscal and monetary objectives of the program will not be modified, so you have no choice but to rebalance between February and March. The target for the year is 1.9% of GDP.
The partial goal established with the international credit organization is $441,500 million by March 31. In other words, the Ministry of Economy has already traveled approximately 46% of the way. In terms of GDP, the Government had to make an adjustment equivalent to 0.44% in the quarter, and it has already consumed 0.20 points of it.
According to the consultant GMA Capital, the result is largely explained by the dynamics of foreign trade. “The drought and the greater tightening of the stocks caused income from foreign trade to contract 25% year-on-year in real terms,” a report indicates, and it is argued that “Part of the increase in expenditures could have corresponded to spending items postponed from the previous month”.
GMA Capital states that the cooling in economic activity that has been taking place since the end of 2022 “appears as a threat to compliance with the fiscal target, since this is usually accompanied by a lower tax collection”.
For its part, Portfolio Personal Inversiones details that “the Government was consumed in the first month, in which everything works in favor to reach a surplus, almost half of the space of the fiscal goal, leaving a margin of $237,562 million for the February-March period”.
Meanwhile, the economist Nadín Argañaraz, head of the Argentine Institute of Fiscal Analysis (IARAF) estimates that in the remainder of 2023, the Government will be obliged to make an additional fiscal effort equivalent to 0.08% of the monthly average GDP compared to the same period in 2022. The analyst calculated that Between February and December of last year, the red of the public sector was 2.68% of GDP, and this year, to achieve the objective, the remaining margin is 1.77%. The difference is 0.9% of GDP in 11 months. This year it will not be possible to appeal to property income that last year represented 0.3% of income.
Source: Ambito
