The main purpose of this paper is to report on the results of an exhaustive reworking of Argentina’s output growth by industry realized by the ARKLEMS+LAND Argentina Productivity and Competitiveness Project. The aim was to reproduce a GDP time series since 1993 using traditional Argentinean national accounting methodology in order to check economic growth against official statistics produced after political intervention in the work of the National Statistics institute since 2007. The reproduced ARKLEMS GDP series closely approximates to official GDP between 1993 and 2007 at macro and industry level. But after 2007, Official series showed a higher growth than ARKLEMS reproducible (29.4% Official GDP vs. 15.9% ARKLEMS GDP for 2007–2012). However, the gap between the series is not related to the use of biased CPI deflators, but it is due to the abandoning of traditional methodology followed by Argentinean national accounts prior to its intervention. The paper shows that Argentina’s recent growth episode of 2002–2012 was similar to the previous positive growth cycle period of 1990–1998. Argentina was not the growth champion of the Latin America region during the later period, but it has one of the highest rates of volatility of GDP across Latin America. Argentine official GDP data has been subject to the so-called ‘Pandora’s Box’ effect as a result of the political intervention in the production of official statistics.

The purpose of this working paper is to analyse the main causes of economic growth in Argentina during the 1990–2006 period. This research proposes a methodology in order to identify Total Factor Productivity (TFP) gains in the strict sense of positive shifts in the production function, independent of short-run cyclical fluctuations in the utilization of productive factors and relative prices effects; distinguishing it from residual or apparent TFP which expresses a phenomenon of real cost changes but not necessarily changes in long-run economic growth. The main results of this research are that strict TFP has a lower trend than apparent TFP. Similar conclusions are obtained in the case of labour productivity adjusted for labour intensity. Argentina sustained a prolonged period of economic growth over 1990–2004, biased to capital accumulation and utilization during the 1990s, and biased to labour input demand after the devaluation year of 2002. In the light of these findings and the data problems after 2007 there are doubts about the ability of the Argentine economy to generate the necessary productivity gains to support sustainable long-term economic growth.