CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

At the beginning of 2016, the Argentine statistical system was declared in state of administrative emergency by a decree of the Executive. This government decision enables the reorganisation of the country´s national statistical agency, the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos (INDEC) created in 1968. The decree also holdsback for almost a year the monthly release of a crucial statistic, the consumer price index (IPC). The declaration of the"National Statistics Emergency" is an expression of an unprecedented crisis of confidence in Argentina´s public statistics. The questioning of official numbers has not been absent from the history of the institutionalisation of statistics which began in the nineteenth century. However, the public debate that began in 2007 regarding the measurement of inflation is a unique event in itself, worth analysing within the sociology of quantification framework. It is relevant particularly for Argentina because price increases have been an important economic phenomenon since its independence and specifically since the 1950s, when it began to be an element used to judge government performance.This paper aims at reconstructing the statistical controversy behind the Argentine IPC between 2007 and 2015. As such, it focuses on the positioning, interests and arguments of the technical and political actors involved, within a long-term perspective that focuses on the history of the construction of the social authority of Argentine official figures. The objective is to provide an assessment of the circumstances and of the technical, social and political factors that led to the loss of credibility of the national statistical system as a whole.