Building on the first three installments in this series (available here, here, and here), let’s start Part IV with a video from an Australian think tank.

Javier Milei’s economy minister can be proud of what’s been accomplished.

Free-market reforms have delivered, slashing spending, balancing budgets, bringing down inflation, restoring growth, lowering poverty, dismantling red tape, shrinking bureaucracy, and rejuvenating financial markets.

Assuming the great mid-term election results pave the way for the further reforms that are needed, Milei may actually achieve his goal of turning Argentina into the world’s freest economy.

Considering it was a basket case just a couple of years ago, it’s astounding to even envision such an outcome.

To illustrate what’s been achieved in Milei’s first two years, let’s look at a new article by Juan Ramón Rallo in Schweizer Monat. Here are some excerpts, starting with four achievements.

To gauge the magnitude of the changes…, it is worth recalling the starting point: a country trapped in annual inflation of 160 percent, a discredited currency, an exchange-rate system fractured by dozens of capital controls and a state on the verge of insolvency. …The first achievement—and perhaps the most evident—is the collapse of inflation. As noted, in November 2023 the year-over-year rate exceeded 160 percent and was still climbing. Today it hovers around 30 percent and continues to fall. …The second major indicator is the country’s risk premium, that is, the extra yield Argentina must pay to borrow on international markets relative to comparable U.S. debt. At the end of 2023, this premium exceeded 2,500 basis points, implying interest rates 25 percentage points higher than in the United States. It reflected a state widely perceived as insolvent. Today that premium is around 600 basis points…a drastic reduction… Closely related is the disappearance of the exchange-rate gap… Until 2023 two currency markets coexisted: an official one, heavily rationed, and a parallel one where the dollar traded at almost three times the official price. This distortion was the product of capital controls and absolute distrust in the peso. Today the gap has fallen to zero. …The fourth achievement is…fiscal clean-up.

There are obviously way more than four achievements, but the above list is a good start.

Now let’s look at the benefits of economic liberalization that are mentioned in the article.

…the economy has entered a recovery phase. …Month by month, economic activity in September 2025 exceeds that of November 2023 by 5 percent… It is unusual for an economy to grow during such a deep fiscal adjustment. …there are 330,000 more people employed than two years ago. In the private sector, employment has increased by 667,000 workers, while public-sector employment has fallen by 367,000. For the first time in a long while, Argentina is creating net jobs in the productive sector and reducing an inflated and inefficient state payroll. …Before Milei took office, poverty exceeded 41 percent of the population… Today it is about to fall below 30 percent.  …Central government spending has fallen from 21.3 percent of GDP in 2023 to 16.5 percent in 2025, its lowest level since 2008. A fiscal consolidation of five percentage points of GDP in two years is something rarely seen in history… In two years, the Argentine president has…laid the groundwork for rebuilding a country devastated by decades of economic mismanagement.

The article has a very uplifting conclusion.

…he has promised to turn Argentina into the freest and most prosperous country on the planet. To reach that goal, the path is clear: deepen spending cuts, lower taxes, privatize state-owned enterprises and dismantle the regulatory thicket that continues to strangle activity. Less state, more market and more freedom.

I’ll close with two comments.

First, I almost feel sorry for the left-wing economists like Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman. They signed a letter in 2023 warning that Argentina’s economy would suffer deeper pain if Milei got elected.

Well, Miilei won and it turns out that the 108 leftist economists were wildly wrong. Not that I’m surprised.

Second, I’m also not surprised that a Swiss journal has an article that praises Milei. Switzerland is arguably the best-governed nation in the world (with perhaps the wisest voters in the world), so it makes sense that there’s an appreciation for Milei’s amazing reforms.

———
Image credit: World Economic Forum | CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.