With his massive austerity program and the radical restructuring of the economic system in his home country, Argentine President Javier Milei apparently wants to recommend himself for the Nobel Prize in Economics.
“Together with my chief advisor Demian Reidel, we are rewriting much of economic theory,” said the ultra-liberal head of state during a visit to the Czech capital Prague.
“If we do it right, I will probably receive the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences together with Demian.” On his ongoing European tour, he collected three prizes from liberal think tanks in Spain, Germany and the Czech Republic in recent days.
Argentina is in the midst of a serious economic crisis. The once rich country is suffering from a bloated state apparatus, low industrial productivity and a large shadow economy that deprives the state of a lot of tax revenue.
Milei now wants to get South America’s second-largest economy back on track with a radical austerity program. The government cut thousands of public sector jobs, reduced subsidies and wound up social programs.
During Milei’s visit to Berlin on Sunday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) stressed the social acceptability of the reforms.
There are indeed initial successes. For the first time in a long time, the Argentine national budget is balanced and inflation has fallen significantly. But this comes at a price: the tough measures are choking economic output.
In the first quarter of the year, economic output fell by 5.1 percent compared to the same period last year, the state statistics agency Indec announced on Monday. According to the Catholic University of Argentina, almost 56 percent of people in Argentina live below the poverty line and around 18 percent live in extreme poverty.
The Nobel Prize in Economics is the only Nobel Prize that does not originate from the will of dynamite inventor and prize founder Alfred Nobel (1833-1896). It has been donated by the Swedish Riksbank since the end of the 1960s and is therefore not, strictly speaking, one of the classic Nobel Prizes. Nevertheless, it is ceremoniously awarded together with the other awards on the anniversary of Nobel’s death, December 10th.