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People of Argentina
Argentina has 36,000,000 people with Roman Catholicism being the main religion. This is one Latin American country where Europeans and North Americans can really feel at home. Famous
for its love for football, the locals adopt a foreigner into their group if he shows an interest in soccer and some nimble foot skills. Argentina is well known in the literary world too by having produced writers of international stature such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Ernesto Sábasto, Manuel Puig and Osvaldo Soriano.
Culture
With heavy influence of various countries, Argentina has acquired quite a diverse culture - be it arts, crafts, music…every segment will have traces of European touches mixed with British, Spanish, German…cultures. But this is a country which is rich in cultural history and has flourishing traditions to boast about. One of the most popular cultures is the tango, a form of dance and music which is considered to be one of the most romantic ways of expressing love. Theatres also dominate the interests of most of the people here. Folk music is another form of entertainment in which the people of Argentina indulge in.
Flag of Argentina
The flag of Argentina constitutes of three equal horizontal bands - light blue at the top and bottom and white in between. The white band has a radiant yellow sun with a human face known as the Sun of May in the center.
Please click here to view the Flag of Argentina
Economy of Argentina
Though Argentina has rich natural resources and heavy deposits of coal, lead, copper, zinc, gold, it has been suffering from recurring economic problems in the past decade.
In the year 1989, when President Carlos Menem took office, the country had piled up huge external debts, inflation had reached 200% per month, and
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output was plummeting. To combat the economic crisis,the government embarked on a path of trade liberalization, deregulation, and privatization. In 1991, it implemented radical monetary reforms which pegged the peso to the US dollar and limited the growth in the monetary base by law to the growth in reserves. Inflation fell sharply in subsequent years. The government privatized most state-controlled companies, opened the economy to foreign trade and investment, improved tax collection, and created private pension and workers compensation systems.
As a result of these policies, Argentina experienced a boom in economic growth in the early 1990s, followed by a period of somewhat more erratic growth in the second half of the decade when the country was hit by a series of external economic shocks.
In 1995, the Mexican peso crisis produced capital flight, the loss of banking system deposits, and a severe, but short-lived, recession; a series of reforms to bolster the domestic banking system followed. Real GDP growth recovered strongly, reaching 8% in 1997. In 1998, international financial turmoil caused by Russia's problems and increasing investor anxiety over Brazil produced the highest domestic interest rates in more than three years, halving the growth rate of the economy. Conditions worsened in 1999 with GDP falling by 3%.
President Fernando de la Rua, who took office in December 1999 following the 10-year administration of former President Carlos Menem, sponsored tax increases and spending cuts to reduce the deficit, which had ballooned to 2.5% of GDP in 1999. The new government also arranged a new $7.4 billion stand-by facility with the IMF for contingency purposes - almost three times the size of the previous arrangement. Key challenges facing the new government included reforming the country's rigid labor code and addressing the precarious financial situation of several highly indebted provinces.
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