Argentina

President Mauricio Macri has made the same sales pitch to bankers, tech titans and world leaders: Argentina’s moved past the populist trap that doomed it for decades. Foreign investors say they like what they’ve seen and heard since Macri took office more than a year ago. But investment is still scarce and the economic reforms meant to heal the economy have driven up the unemployment and inflation rates. How long will Argentines swallow Macri’s medicine?

Macri has run through much of his fiscal to-do list. Argentina emerged from recession in the third quarter of 2016. S&P Global Ratings raised its credit rating by a notch in April. Macri has lifted currency controls that had shaken faith in the peso. He’s corrected years of government data on things like inflation and gross domestic product that had been made up or polished. He’s phasing out energy and public transportation subsidies. By the first quarter of 2017, his tax amnesty plan had convinced Argentinians to declare $116.8 billion in assets that had been hidden under mattresses or overseas. And he settled a 15-year dispute with creditors. This paved the way for Argentina to sell debt abroad again in April 2016 — $16.5 billion in bonds that at the time set a single-day sales record for a developing country. But the economic recovery Macri’s promised has failed to materialize for many people and one third of the population lives below the poverty level. After 2016 economic data was published showing a hobbled economy, his approval rating fell below 50 percent for the first time. Macri, needing a scapegoat, as one former securities regulator put it, fired his finance minister in December.