CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The main purpose of this paper is to make an exhaustive revision of the Argentina National Accounts' methodology in order to reproduce GDP series since 1993 and check economic growth after political intervention of official statistics. This work depicts the results of estimating the GDP taking into account the same traditional series and methodology that had been used for 25 years up to the intervention of the official statistics in 2007. This research shows that our series reproduces Argentina?s GDP growth from 1993 up to 2006. Since then, the difference between the official series and ARKLEMS reproducible series accumulates an important positive bias. The divergence between our results and official figures is due to the withdrawal of the traditional GDP measurement methodology in almost every sector of GDP. The paper shows that these distortions are not based on deflating value added by industry at current prices levels with manipulated price indices but mainly on discretional intervention in every industry component of the GDP, not only financial sector but also trade and manufacturing and the rest of services and goods production sectors, with the objective to be to show a higher GDP growth. Official series present a GDP that grows at higher rates during the recent recovery period (2003-2012) than in the previous one (1990-1998), and make Argentina to lead the GDP performance of the region. But, this research demonstrated that ARKLEMS reproducible GDP for recent growth episode has a similar performance to previous positive cycle, 1990-1998. Tehcnical analyses based on typical NBER cycle decomposition updated by Hausman et.al. (2005), shows that Argentina does not have a sustainable growth acceleration. The paper showed that Argentina growth was important during recent growth episode, but contrary to official figures, was not the growth championship of Latin America region. Argentina has also one of the largest GDP volatilities in the whole region, showing a very slow performance, lower (next to Mexico) than the region and Brazil, when the comparison is realized between peaks of economic cycle (1998-2012). After checking the results using the same traditional series and methods that were customary in Argentina before 2007, Argentine official GDP could not evade the so-called ?Pandora Box? effects, caused by the political intervention of official statistics.