Ian Vásquez and Guillermina Sutter Schneider
Argentina’s President Javier Milei promised to take his chainsaw to regulations when he assumed power a year ago this week. His newly created Ministry of Deregulation began functioning in July, and virtually every day, Minister Federico Sturzenegger announces one or numerous regulatory reforms.
Getting public spending under control and cutting red tape have been Milei’s two policy priorities this year. His success in shrinking government largesse, balancing the budget, and reducing inflation are well known. Less appreciated is how much he’s been deregulating, so we decided to try to measure that effort.
We should note that prioritizing deregulation makes sense. A legacy of the corporatist state that Peronism entrenched, Argentina is one of the most regulated countries in the world. On the Fraser Institute’s economic freedom index, Argentina ranks 146 out of 165 countries in terms of regulatory burden.
Measuring regulatory reform is challenging. Argentine government data is sometimes incomplete or vague. How to quantify reform can also be open to judgment. (Does the elimination of various articles of a regulation affecting different forms of economic activity count as one reform or several? What about the elimination of an entire law or its modification?)
The best source on deregulation in Argentina is the deregulation czar himself, Federico Sturzenegger. We used his posts on X and those of his ministry, where deregulations are regularly announced, and cross-checked them on other government websites. We were conservative in our quantification. If one or dozens of articles were eliminated or modified within one law, we simply counted that as one deregulation. (Each law that was deregulated, no matter to what extent, counted as one deregulation.)
What did we find? From December 10, 2023, when Milei assumed the presidency, to December 7, 2024, there were 672 regulatory reforms. On average, that means that during his presidency, Milei has been issuing 1.84 deregulations per day, counting weekends. Out of the total amount of reforms, 331 eliminated regulations and 341 modified existing regulations.
The heat chart above shows how many regulatory reforms Milei’s government has issued per week over the past year. Milei, in fact, began his administration with a deregulatory bang, introducing an emergency “megadecree” last December that consisted of 366 articles and has continued this drive with the creation of the new ministry. Argentine law allows emergency decrees, which are reviewable by Congress, under certain conditions. Most of the deregulations in the “megadecree” are in force.
In June of this year, the congress passed a massive bill that Milei presented (“Ley Bases”) that gave the president the ability to issue further deregulations for a period of one year. That is the authority under which most of Argentina’s deregulations are currently taking place. (The majority of Milei’s deregulations have since come out in the second half of the year.)
The laws and regulations that Milei has abolished or modified date back well into the 20th century and, in some cases, even further. We found that 12 percent of the laws that Milei deregulated took effect during military dictatorships and 88 percent originated during democracy, including under populist governments of the left. (The chart below is based on deregulations for which we could obtain sufficient information. Some of the laws that were deregulated took effect in the administrations that followed the ones that introduced them.)
Argentina’s deregulation drive covers a wide range of sectors: housing, pharmaceuticals, technology, non-tariff trade barriers, transportation, tourism, energy, agriculture, etc. Some reform has been procedural, affecting a range of areas. For example, Milei has instituted a “positive administrative silence” rule affecting numerous activities by which a requested permission is considered approved if the government bureaucracy does not respond to the request within a determined period of time.
It’s too early to measure the full impact of the deregulations, but there’s no doubt that they are significant given the bureaucratic weight they are lifting. Some indication of that can be seen in the following examples:
The elimination of an import licensing scheme has led to a 35% drop in home appliances and a 20% drop in clothing items.
The lifting of Argentina’s burdensome rent control system has resulted in a tripling of the supply of rental apartments in Buenos Aires and a nearly 50% drop in price.
The elimination of a floor price of yerba mate, which is widely consumed in Argentina as a tea, led to a 25% drop in its price.
Many other deregulations, whose impact has not yet been measured, could be cited. Argentina has begun implementing an open skies policy that has increased the number of airlines operating there. The government has also lifted regulations that favored the state-owned airline Aerolineas Argentinas, such as the requirement that public employees book their flights on the more expensive state airline or that other airlines cannot park their airplanes overnight at one of the main airports in Buenos Aires. Milei has gotten rid of legally sanctioned hereditary positions at numerous government agencies (yes, you read that right). The government has permitted Starlink and Amazon to provide satellite internet service in the country, providing connectivity to vast swaths of Argentina that until now had no such connection. Etc., etc.
When one of us (Ian) and a colleague visited Sturzenegger and his team at the ministry last month, we were struck by their sense of urgency, professionalism, and commitment to the task. They made clear that their priority was to increase freedom. When reviewing regulations, their first question is not about how to increase efficiency but rather about whether the government should be involved in a particular regulation at all.
The deregulation team, made up of accomplished economists and legal experts, is up against the clock. During our visit, a countdown sign outside the minister’s office read “237 days left,” indicating the time remaining, according to current law, for the government to continue issuing deregulatory decrees. Argentina is a target-rich environment for the ministry’s work, and it is taking recommendations from the public at large (when the ministry recently set up a web portal to that effect called “Report the bureaucracy,” it received more than 1,300 entries within the first eight hours). The biggest challenges are doing as much as they can with the time remaining and prioritizing regulatory reform, which is sometimes informed by large differences in Argentine versus international prices.
Milei and Sturzenegger have their work cut out for them. But what they are accomplishing is more than most thought could be done in such a short period of time. Their deregulations are increasing economic freedom, reducing opportunities for corruption, creating greater transparency in government, helping to formalize the informal sector, stimulating growth, and setting an example for countries around the world to follow.
*Guillermina Sutter Schneider is a data scientist and information designer and a coauthor of the Human Freedom Index. This article draws partially from “Desregulacion: Argentina vs. Estados Unidos,” by Ian Vasquez (November 20, 2024) and “Argentina’s Escape from Kafka’s Castle,” by Guillermina Sutter Schneider (December 5, 2024).
