President Javier Milei has confirmed that he will attempt to move forward with further pension and labor reforms in 2025, as well as seeking further privatizations of public companies. His comments came in an interview with Forbes published on Sunday.

“We will keep removing regulations,” he said. “This year, we rose 70 places in economic freedom. We moved from being among the 35 worst to the middle.” 

The president did not specify which index he was referring to, although Argentina was ranked in the bottom 35 countries for which data was available in the Heritage Foundation’s most recent index of economic freedom. 

“We’ve only applied a quarter of the reforms,” he continued. “There are still 3,200 to go. We will remove them to the extent that Congress allows.”

In 2025, he said, “we’re going to move forward with an agenda of privatizations and an expansion of labor reform. To the extent that the labor reform works out, we can advance with a pension reform.”

In this respect, the president highlighted changes he had implemented through the Bases Law. He said that they would make it possible to expand Argentina’s labor market from 6.5 million people to 14.5 million people. This, he said, meant that “the pension system numbers will change dramatically in favor of retirees having better pensions.”

Milei also reflected on the achievements of his first year in office. “We’re eliminating inflation, which means that the distortion in relative prices is being eliminated, and that favors the accumulation of capital. We’re cutting taxes. We’ve carried out 800 structural reforms. Every day we remove regulations,” he said. 

He is not done with the chainsaw, either. “We made a first major cut, and now we’re getting to the deeper stuff, which isn’t just deregulating and removing barriers, but it implies a new state reform, to make it even smaller.”

An excerpt of the interview published on December 22 reported Milei’s comments that three conditions were necessary for him to lift Argentina’s capital controls: an independently floating exchange rate, resolving issues with the Central Bank’s stocks, and aligning the traditional and broad monetary bases.

–C5N.com/Herald