The Gulf Time Newspaper One of the finest business newspapers in the UAE brought to you by our professional writers and editors.
Bloomberg
Argentina’s economy grew 2.1 percent in 2015 as a record soy harvest boosted the country’s agricultural exports.
Gross domestic product in South America’s second-largest economy expanded by 0.9 percent in the fourth quarter and 3.5 percent in the third quarter, the national statistics agency said on Wednesday. The median estimate of four economists in a Bloomberg survey was for a contraction of 0.8 percent in the fourth quarter.
Last year’s growth was led by a boom in agricultural exports following a record soybean harvest of 61.4 million metric tons. Agriculture grew 6.4 percent last year while construction expanded by 5 percent, according to Indec.
The government of President Mauricio Macri, who assumed office in December, declared a ’statistical emergency’ and vowed to overhaul the indexes produced by the statistics agency known as Indec, saying they were inaccurate. It’s a belief shared by private economists and the International Monetary Fund which sanctioned
Argentina in 2013 for
producing unreliable economic data.
The IMF said June 3 that Argentina is not yet in full compliance on its data reporting and extended the deadline by a year to address inconsistencies within its inflation and GDP indexes.