How not to Face Debt Traps in Dependent Economies: Argentina’s Recent Experience in Hindsight

Abstract

Recent debate on debt sustainability in Argentina has put forth the need to establish new parameters into the international credit institutions’s debt sustainability assessments. Our work will provide new insights into the way to avoid standard austerity-led debt traps in the context of dependent economies in the current global era of stagflation.We will provide a situated critic of standard assessments while delving into the core of the debt sustainability discussion. We will clarify the limits of mainstream approaches to debt sustainability and provide a clearer undertanting of how we need to made visible some key assumptions at the core of the debt sustainability models. We’ll show how to include more evidently the social and political conflict and, thus, human rights limitations into the framework for debt repayment strategies in dependent economies.Our assessment will include a political economy approach to the very same concept of debt sustainability, underlining the hidden dwellings behind the standard assessments. These will include standards of living and working restrictions for waged and unwaged people, political and human rights barriers, fiscal and regulatory strategies, and some key limits with origin ecological and economic metabolism of capitalist economies in dependent settings.We will then provide a synthetic reflection on the maner in which we can build a better, more realistic framework to asses debt sustainability, especially in countries that have consistently shown difficulties to comply with current standards (i.e., Argentina).