Aldo Ferrer, former Economy Minister and Argentina's leading opponent of globalization, dead at 88.
Argentine economist and former Economy Minister Aldo Ferrer has died today at the age of 88. Ferrer, known for his economic nationalism and opposition to globalization, had a long career in public service.
Trained by leading developmentalist academic Raúl Prebisch, Ferrer and other centrist economists co-founded the Argentine Association of Political Economy, a macroeconomic research foundation, in 1957. He was named provincial economy minister in 1958, at age 31, by the progressive new governor of Buenos Aires Province, Oscar Alende. His four-year tenure saw record investment in public works and the promotion of the Greater Buenos Aires metro area as the nation's leading industrial hub.
He later served as a committee member in President John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress, and in 1967 co-founded the Latin American Social Science Council (CLACSO) as consultants to UNESCO.
Ferrer, however, is best remembered for his promotion of domestic industry during his brief stint as Economy Minister of Argentina in 1970 and 1971. Opposed to income concentration whether by social class or region, Ferrer restored collective bargaining rights and created a small industry lender (BANADE). He also promoted industries in the country's more remote regions, notably paper and aluminum. He enacted requirements for more domestic inputs in autos and other consumer durables, and appeared in ads encouraging consumers to "Buy Domestic."
Ferrer's efforts to discourage speculative hoarding and underproduction in Argentine farming drew opposition from the powerful beef and grain lobbies, however, and pressure from groups such as the landowner-controlled United Farmland Movement (MCU) led to his dismissal in May 1971.
Long affiliated with the centrist UCR, Ferrer was named president of the Bank of the Province of Buenos Aires (the nation's second largest) when President Raúl Alfonsín took office in 1983. Differences with President Alfonsín's austerity policies led to his resignation in 1987, and he returned to academia and writing.
Ferrer became a vocal opponent of globalization at the height of its popularity in the 1990s, and wrote two books on the subject: A History of Globalization (1996), and From Columbus to the Internet: Globalization in Latin America (2000). Ferrer denounced globalization for its dependence on slavery, and saw it as a continuum with the brutal colonial economics of prior centuries.
He co-founded Grupo Fénix, an economic think tank, in 2001, and a number of their members and proposals were later incorporated into the populist administrations of Presidents Néstor and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner from 2003 to 2015. These included more active state intervention, protectionist import limits, and restored collective bargaining rights and purchasing power. Despite high inflation, real GDP doubled in 12 years.
Ferrer's last public post was as Ambassador to France from 2010 to 2013. He remained active as editor of Buenos Aires Económico from 2008 until his last days, and was critical of both the Kirchner administration's failure to limit cheap imports and the right-wing policies adopted recently by President Mauricio Macri.
"Macri presumes to go to the IMF to ask them to tell us what to do, to go to New York to apologize to Judge Griesa and pay the vulture funds, and to bow down and take on more debt. That has been tried and it doesn't work here or anywhere else," Ferrer said. "Taking on debt to mitigate the shortage of dollars does not solve the underlying problem. Indebtedness will add to our existing problems, which is what already happened to us during the 1976 dictatorship and in the 1990s."
Ferrer died in Buenos Aires this morning of congestive heart failure. He was 88.
At: http://buenosairesherald.com/article/210276/economist-aldo-ferrer-dies
And: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=http://www.diariobae.com/notas/114266-fallecio-el-economista-aldo-ferrer.html&prev=search
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