Still Passing the Buck: Macroeconomic and Fiscal Performance of Argentine Administrations, 1853–2025

We rank all 41 Argentine national administrations that governed between 1853 and 2025 with the two indices proposed by della Paolera, Irigoin, and Bózzoli (2003)— the Classical Macroeconomic Performance Index (CMPI) and the Fiscal Pressure Index (FPI) — and their combined Overall Index, scoring each government by themacroeconomic and fiscal improvement it delivered over the situation it inherited. A single percentile pool of 173 annual observations places every administration, fromthe mid-nineteenth-century Confederation to the 2024–25 stabilization, on a common scale. Extending the original 1853–1999 analysis through 2025 requires confronting documented distortions in modern Argentine statistics: we catalogue twenty-one manipulation and accounting practices, correct the affected series from independent and reproducible sources, and bound the judgment-dependent cases with sensitivity variants. On the restricted 1853–1999 pool the replication of the original rankings is almost exact (Spearman ρ = 0.997 for the FPI, 0.952 for the CMPI). In the unified ranking Menem (1990–95) leads the CMPI and the Overall Index. Consolidating the central bank’s quasi-fiscal debt into the public debt stock and valuing output at the free-market exchange rate during exchange-control years materially reorders the modern fiscal ranking. The long-run results confirm the original passing-the-buck thesis: administrations bought macroeconomic calm with debt — on the Treasury’s books or hidden in the central bank — and passed the bill to their successors.