The rulers recite formulas of adjustment and containment of spending, SMEs close, workers say goodbye, the productive framework weakens and territorial inequality is deepened.
The country cannot be sustained only with numbers of zero deficitwithout policies that prioritize industry and commerce, which protect the domestic market and stop the mass closure of companies. SMEs are disappearing and, with them, the real engine of employment, regional capital and productive innovation.
The obsession with fiscal balance, That abstract mandate that the National Government defends as an cornering stone of its economic management, has become a prison for small and medium -sized companies in the industry and retail trade in Argentina. Budgets that prioritize zero deficit but exclude a central component such as national production do not rebuild, but destroy.
The most recent figures show it with brutal clarity: while the rulers recite formulas of adjustment and containment of spending, SMEs close, workers say goodbye, the productive framework weakens and territorial inequality is deepened.
The statistical emergency: how much we already lost
- Between November 2023 and May 2025 they closed 15,564 SMEs that had registered staff, going from 512.357 to 496,793 active employers.
- In that same period, they lost 223,537 registered jobs In Argentina.
- Especially hit sectors: transport and storage (–10.4 %), real estate services (–8.8 %), wholesale and retail trade (–1.6 %), professional, scientific and technical services (–5.7 %), and construction (–7.7 %).
- In the industrial sector, branches such as tires, textiles, clothing, leather/footwear show production falls ranging from 29 % to 50 % in just over a year.
- In terms of layoffs: almost 100,000 private jobs They have vanished since December 2023, with construction and industry as the most punished items.
- It closes at a rate of 30/40 SMEs per day.
These data are not mere statistics, they are lives, abandoned production centers, torn social fabric: families without admission, regions with homeless industries, value chains imposing in the short term.
The error of the rigid model: what fails when prioritizing fiscal balance over everything else
- Ignorance of the leading role of national production. There can be no fiscal balance without industry, without productive employment, without exports with added value. An economy that does not produce cannot sustain taxes, cannot export, cannot generate genuine income.
- Indiscriminate opening policies. The reduction of tariffs, the elimination of certificates that regulate imports, unequal competition with imported or low -cost products … are factors that destroy industries that do not compete with volume or scale. This is evidenced in the brutal drop of textile production, tires, construction supplies, etc.
- Dye domestic market. The fall of the real salary (beyond economic operators who speak of “salary anchors”) is making millions of consumers cannot buy what SMEs produce. There is no demand, there is no possibility of scale, there is no reinvestment.
- Disarticulation of provincial/regional entrepreneurial fabric. SMEs are not only in large urban centers; Its mass closure represents an impoverishment of the interior, of local economies, of territorial innovation, of roots.
- Absence of dialogue and strategic design. Many of the recent budget ads ninggune the productive sector, do not consider it “ingredient” of the fiscal equilibrium economic recipe. The economic plan does not seem to consider industry, exports, domestic market or work sources among their priorities.
As president of Feba, I propose some urgent lines of action:
Differentially favorable fiscal policies for SMEs: Tax relief, reduction of tax rates for working capital, reset incentives, interesting interest rates to finance production and export.
Sensible protection against imports that kill industries: tariff review, reinstatement of strategic non -tariff barriers when there is a risk of irreparable damage to local productive fabric.
Internal Market Recovery Plan: Strengthen popular income, real wages, internal consumption; foster public works that demand supplies from SMEs; state purchases oriented to national products.
Strategic support to regional value chains: subsidies, infrastructure, training, logistics connection for SMEs of provinces that have higher costs by distance or smaller scale.
The fiscal balance is an important objective, but it cannot and should not be an end that justifies sacrificing the most valuable Argentina today: its productive capacity, its industrial diversity, its domestic market, the dignity of work and the regional productive presence.
If production is not put in the center of the national project, if the closure of SMEs does not stop, we will lose not only companies: we will also run out of future. And a country without a future has no possible balance.
* President of the Economic Federation of the Province of Buenos Aires (FEBA)
Source: Ambito
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