He Minister of Infrastructure, Guillermo Ferraro, confirmed the Government’s idea that “the State withdraws from everything that can influence the private sector and assumes a guiding role.” He did so by presenting in the plenary session of commissions of the Chamber of Deputies, which analyzes the so-called Omnibus Law, through which the Executive seeks, together with DNU 70, modify a good part of the country’s institutional framework.
“The objective is to achieve a investment climate for companies, since the decisions made today need time to mature. This is a normal country that we imagine in three years with, for example, the guarantee that there will be no regulations that interrupt the production process. The private sector may have its drawbacks, but it is the only one that can ensure that it works well, because every time the State intervenes it alters it. There is no enlightened person who can tell the private sector what to do. We want the State to withdraw from everything that can influence the private sector and assume a guiding role,” Ferraro said.
The liberal conception of the Government is that The withdrawal of state action opens the space for private investment. The underlying logic is that the State would need fewer fiscal resources, by reducing its intervention, and Companies would put the excellent result of paying less taxes into investments.
The impact
However, construction employers, together with union entities, warn about the profound negative impact that the paralysis of public works. For example, days ago Gerardo Antonio Fernández, president of the Confederation of Construction SMEs of the Argentine Republic (CPC), warned in a interview what “ehe end of public works could leave more than 2 million people unemployed. The private sector cannot take charge of these works, on the one hand because A border school, a water network or a health center in the interior of the country are not profitable works that can be financed and sold like any other asset. Furthermore, it is clear that if the country has not grown in the last 20 years, companies have followed the same destiny and have not grown enough to have assets that allow them to face investments. And to this is added that the financial system has been dedicated for years to assisting the State, without serious and genuine financing of any kind towards the private sector”.
Even leaders of the opposition friendly to the Government, such as Martín Llaryora, governor of the province of Córdoba, differ from the ruling party. “Public works generate employment and progress. And that is why we are going to continue promoting construction projects, especially those that are done in the localities to generate more local employment,” Llaryora assured in recent days. Construction companies estimate that 80,000 jobs were lost in the sector in the last month. Thus, direct employment in construction is around 420 thousand workers.
Ferraro lamented that “today most of the concessions initiated in those years are precarious or with extensions, such as road corridors, waterways or ports.” He considered that the transportation system in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area (AMBA) “It is practically nationalized, because 90 percent of the costs are paid by the national governmentand in the case of trains, 98 percent is paid.
In relation to the Large Investment Regime contemplated by the Omnibus Law, which consists of a long series of benefits for companies that invest in the country, Ferraro said that “the investment climate is discouraging. We want to change this perverse structural system. , and not better manage what is. This implies a cultural change, which requires a clarity in the approach and perseverance over time. “It is a change to become a normal country again, where the businessman becomes a businessman again, in the best sense of the word, and for that we must preserve it.”
