The economist Oscar Cetrángolo (71), a renowned and leading researcher in the field of public finance and social protection at national and regional levels, died this Tuesday. He has worked in organizations such as ECLAC, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and at several universities, including the UBA.
Cetrángolo has a degree in economics (UBA) from the University of Sussex in England and played a prominent role as an economist in researching and monitoring financial policy from the democratic recovery until recently.
First, its contribution was developed in the 1980s from the fiscal logic and the imbalance of public finances in the context of high inflation. Later in the 1990s he discussed the impact of social reforms and their impact on tax sharing. He was a critic of Carlos Menem’s pension reform as well as the AFJP system and the organized healthcare system.
Already at the end of the 1990s he was a member of the economic team of José Luis Machinea (with the Alliance in the government of Fernando De la Rúa), where he dealt with fiscal relations with the provinces. The finance minister was Mario Vicens.
He later worked at ECLAC, where he broadened his scope of public policy to include education, income protection and childhood issues.
In recent years he was a founding member of the Interdisciplinary Political Economy of the Faculty of Economics of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) – National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET). He was director of the master’s program in economics at the faculty and the bachelor’s program. He was recently appointed Professor Emeritus at the UBA’s FCE.
As a specialist in tax issues, Cetrángolo is an advocate of income tax as one of the pillars of a fair and solvent tax system. He published a work examining the history of the income tax in Argentina from the 1930s to the present, showing how its collection has grown since the 1930s, fluctuating between Peronism and the Alfonsín government, rising again with Menem, and stagnating in the last decade.
More recently, he was the author of the term “macroeconomic destabilization program”, which refers to the increase in public spending by 18 percentage points of GDP between 2005 and 2015, which, according to him, is an almost unique case in the world. Outside the radius of orthodoxy, Cetrángolo attempted to explain how the performance of fiscal policy not only exacerbated the country’s structural problems, but also again suffered from high inflation and unsustainable debt levels during this period of Kirchnerism.
Cetrángolo, a River Plate fan, pizza maker and lover of the Rolling Stones, was, in short, an expert in an area of economics that today, paradoxically, is once again at the center of attention (fiscal matters), but with an approach in which he always pointed out the presence of market failures and that the reforms needed in Argentina (e.g. tax reforms) are necessary, given the gap in the provision of public services at the territorial level, with the consequent human impacts Development, justice and social cohesion may not be enough.
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