Friday March 24, 2023 | 5:33 p.m.
Argentina’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increased by 5.2% in 2022, positioning it as the third country with the highest growth in Latin America, only behind Colombia (+7.2%) and Ecuador (+6, 3%), highlighted a report from the Center for Production Studies (CEP XXI) of the Ministry of Economy.
Following these countries were the Dominican Republic (+4.9%), Costa Rica (+4.3%), Honduras (+4.2%), Guatemala (+4%) and El Salvador (+3.6%). %).
Next -and with growth of less than 3%- were Brazil and Mexico (+2.9% in both cases), and Chile and Peru (+2.7%).
The only country in the sample that ended with a negative variation was Paraguay, which showed a decline in its GDP of 0.5%, according to preliminary data published by telam.
The CEP XXI report only takes into account those countries with monthly economic activity indicators, updated to date. For this reason, countries such as Venezuela, Uruguay, Panama and Bolivia were not part of the analysis.
On the other hand, in the comparison against 2019 -the last year before the coronavirus pandemic- last year the highest growth was registered in Guatemala (+10.3%); Ecuador (+10.0%) and the Dominican Republic (+9.8%).
Argentina, meanwhile, rose 4.6% in this comparison and Mexico was the only country to register a fall (-0.8%).
The CEP work also analyzed the performance of economic activity in the month of December 2022 compared to the previous November.
In the last month of last year, six of the fifteen surveyed countries presented contractions in their economic activity; the most notable drops occurred in Ecuador and Argentina (-1.5% and -1.0%, respectively).
“Regarding the countries that grew, it should be noted that their increases were moderate (less than 1%) and only Honduras and Paraguay grew above 1%,” the document highlighted.
And he added that “this could respond, on the one hand, to the exhaustion of the post-pandemic recovery and rebound effect and, on the other hand, to more restrictive monetary policies, limitations on fiscal spending and a more adverse international context, among others” .
Indeed, in December the main Latin American economies (Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru) registered uneven behavior.
Argentina and Peru registered new month-on-month falls. For their part, both Colombia (+0.6%) and Chile (+0.4%), Mexico (+0.3%) and Brazil (+0.3%) reported moderate month-on-month increases after having registered decreases in the previous months.
