Still Passing the Buck: Macroeconomic and Fiscal Performance of Argentine Administrations, 1853–2025

We rank all 41 Argentine national administrations that governed between 1853and 2025 with the two indices proposed by della Paolera, Irigoin, and Bózzoli (2003)— the Classical Macroeconomic Performance Index (CMPI) and the Fiscal PressureIndex (FPI) — and their combined Overall Index, scoring each government by themacroeconomic and fiscal improvement it delivered over the situation it inherited. Asingle percentile pool of 173 annual observations places every administration, fromthe mid-nineteenth-century Confederation to the 2024–25 stabilization, on a commonscale. Extending the original 1853–1999 analysis through 2025 requires confrontingdocumented distortions in modern Argentine statistics: we catalogue twenty-onemanipulation and accounting practices, correct the affected series from independentand reproducible sources, and bound the judgment-dependent cases with sensitivityvariants. On the restricted 1853–1999 pool the replication of the original rankings isalmost exact (Spearman 𝜌 = 0.997 for the FPI, 0.952 for the CMPI). In the unifiedranking Menem (1990–95) leads the CMPI and the Overall Index. Consolidatingthe central bank’s quasi-fiscal debt into the public debt stock and valuing output atthe free-market exchange rate during exchange-control years materially reorders themodern fiscal ranking. The long-run results confirm the original passing-the-buck thesis:administrations bought macroeconomic calm with debt — on the Treasury’s books orhidden in the central bank — and passed the bill to their successors.