Joao Valente Aguiar, once again, felt the need to remind his readers of his modus operandi. While he seems unable to write a blog post without insulting whoever doesn't fit his very narrow concept of left (latest example here), which is probably fitting for a former Stalinist fanatic, he continues to be unable to withstand any scrutiny without losing his mind.
In the umpteenth discussion about the Euro, Argentina was brought to the fore by Aguiar himself, in the 4th comment to this blog post, which lead to an exchange between Joao Bernardo and Miguel Madeira, where Bernardo stated that "Argentina was an important commodity exporter", leading to my entry in such a debate, as well as a longer post here, too. As a result, Aguiar decided to do the following two things:
1) Write something that he presumably thought was an intelligent reply (20th comment on the above-mentioned post) - perhaps fortunately for him, ignorance does indeed seem to be bliss (more on that later).
2) Censor my reply countering his claims, stating that it was off-topic and only noise-generating, while conveniently ignoring the fact that it was himself who first brought the topic to discussion and other participants had been engaged in exchanges on that very topic.
Rewinding for a bit, my participation in the debate was merely to state in a very concise way, as I had already done at greater length here, that only 12% of the Argentinean growth during the 2002-2008 period was due to exports and, within those, commodity exports were a minority. None of Aguiar's arguments seems to hold up:
a) Rather oddly, he responds by quoting export data from 2014, which is obviously irrelevant to Argentina's performance during the 2002-08 period.
b) He triumphantly quotes the following passage from Weisbrot et al.'s report, in page 6: "However, this measure of real (inflation-adjusted) contributions to growth does not measure the full impact of exports when there are significant price increases for exports. In this case, if the price increase is large enough and the affected exports are a big enough share of the economy, the increased income can contribute to growth and to living standards (through the consumption of imports that do not add directly to GDP) in other ways, that do not show up in the real contributions to GDP growth measured above". He follows that up by declaring that the authors were far more careful and less adamant in their statements than I had been, and hints that I dishonestly cherry-picked the report's statements that were most convenient for my argument.
This last statement is patently false and an extremely dishonest one for Aguiar to make: on one hand, I had addressed that myself in my longer blog post, which he presumably had seen, given the off-hand remark he makes about the Argentinean statistical services; on the other hand, he incomprehensibly fails to quote the following two paragraphs from that very study:
If this is not adamant and categorical, I don't know what is. Unfortunately, Aguiar passed on the chance to further elaborate on his argument, instead choosing to censor my reply.
c) In a subsequent comment, Aguiar claims that he used official data (though he declines to say it was from 2014, and hence irrelevant for the topic under discussion) from the Argentinean State, while I did not. It is again, an odd claim. The parts of the report I quoted used data from INDEC, just as Aguiar did, and also from CEPAL (which, as a regional United Nations Commission, is also an official source).
In short, none of Aguiar's claims hold up to scrutiny, and some are woefully dishonest. One might wonder why he decided to censor my reply to his claims...
In the umpteenth discussion about the Euro, Argentina was brought to the fore by Aguiar himself, in the 4th comment to this blog post, which lead to an exchange between Joao Bernardo and Miguel Madeira, where Bernardo stated that "Argentina was an important commodity exporter", leading to my entry in such a debate, as well as a longer post here, too. As a result, Aguiar decided to do the following two things:
1) Write something that he presumably thought was an intelligent reply (20th comment on the above-mentioned post) - perhaps fortunately for him, ignorance does indeed seem to be bliss (more on that later).
2) Censor my reply countering his claims, stating that it was off-topic and only noise-generating, while conveniently ignoring the fact that it was himself who first brought the topic to discussion and other participants had been engaged in exchanges on that very topic.
Rewinding for a bit, my participation in the debate was merely to state in a very concise way, as I had already done at greater length here, that only 12% of the Argentinean growth during the 2002-2008 period was due to exports and, within those, commodity exports were a minority. None of Aguiar's arguments seems to hold up:
a) Rather oddly, he responds by quoting export data from 2014, which is obviously irrelevant to Argentina's performance during the 2002-08 period.
b) He triumphantly quotes the following passage from Weisbrot et al.'s report, in page 6: "However, this measure of real (inflation-adjusted) contributions to growth does not measure the full impact of exports when there are significant price increases for exports. In this case, if the price increase is large enough and the affected exports are a big enough share of the economy, the increased income can contribute to growth and to living standards (through the consumption of imports that do not add directly to GDP) in other ways, that do not show up in the real contributions to GDP growth measured above". He follows that up by declaring that the authors were far more careful and less adamant in their statements than I had been, and hints that I dishonestly cherry-picked the report's statements that were most convenient for my argument.
This last statement is patently false and an extremely dishonest one for Aguiar to make: on one hand, I had addressed that myself in my longer blog post, which he presumably had seen, given the off-hand remark he makes about the Argentinean statistical services; on the other hand, he incomprehensibly fails to quote the following two paragraphs from that very study:
"To consider these other effects of the rising value of exports, Figures 2 and 3 show Argentina’s annual exports by value, and by category; this is shown both in current dollars and below, in percent of GDP.
As can be seen in the graphs, exports as a percent of GDP, as measured by dollar value, actually decreased during the recovery. And agricultural exports, as a percent of GDP, fell slightly from 5.0 percent of GDP to 4.7 percent, dipping as low as 3.4 percent in 2006 – again, this is measured by dollar value, so it reflects the large increases in commodity prices from 2005 to 2008. So agricultural exports are clearly not driving growth; and in fact they are too small a share of GDP to have anywhere near the kind of impact that is often attributed to them."It is therefore clear that the authors did look into the additional contributions that exports might have had to improvements in living standards, and I had noted as much in the previously-mentioned post. This would suffice to put to rest Aguiar's claim that the authors had been far more careful in their statements than me. But, rather hilariously, Mark Weisbrot, the study's lead author, also wrote an article for The Guardian, shortly after the publication of that report. In his own words:
"It turns out that only 12% of Argentina's real GDP growth during this period was due to any kind of exports at all. And just a fraction of this 12% was due to commodity exports, including soybeans. So Argentina's economic growth from 2002-2010 was not an export-led growth experience, by any stretch of the imagination, still less, a "commodities boom".
The other possibility is based on prices: the price of soybeans and other commodity exports also rose during part of this period. This can boost the economy in various ways, even if the physical amount of exports does not increase as rapidly as the economy. If this were driving Argentina's growth, we would expect the dollar value of these exports to have grown faster than the rest of the economy. But this did not happen either. The value of agricultural exports, including of course soybeans, as a percent of Argentina's GDP didn't rise during the expansion. It was about 5% of GDP when the economy started growing in 2002, and 3.7% of GDP in 2010.
In other words, there is no plausible story that anyone can tell from the data to support the idea that Argentina's growth over the past nine years was driven by a "commodities boom." Why does this matter? Well, as economist Paul Krugman noted yesterday, "articles about Argentina are almost always very negative in tone ― they are irresponsible, they are renationalizing some industries, they talk populist, so they must be going very badly." Which, he points out, "doesn't speak well for the state of economics reporting." It sure doesn't.
The myth of the "commodities export boom" is one way that Argentina's detractors dismiss Argentina's economic growth as just dumb luck. But the reality is that the economic expansion has been led by domestic consumption and investment. And it happened because the Argentine government changed its most important macroeconomic choices: on fiscal, monetary, and exchange rate policies. That is what took Argentina out of its 1998-2002 depression and turned it into the fastest-growing economy in the Americas."
If this is not adamant and categorical, I don't know what is. Unfortunately, Aguiar passed on the chance to further elaborate on his argument, instead choosing to censor my reply.
c) In a subsequent comment, Aguiar claims that he used official data (though he declines to say it was from 2014, and hence irrelevant for the topic under discussion) from the Argentinean State, while I did not. It is again, an odd claim. The parts of the report I quoted used data from INDEC, just as Aguiar did, and also from CEPAL (which, as a regional United Nations Commission, is also an official source).
In short, none of Aguiar's claims hold up to scrutiny, and some are woefully dishonest. One might wonder why he decided to censor my reply to his claims...
No comments:
Post a Comment