Reiterated Infrastructural Gaps Ignored

The Javier Milei Presidency seems to specialise in meeting necessary conditions falling short of being sufficient – the RIGI incentive scheme for major investments now being given steroids with corporate taxation halved no more suffices for economic transformation than a fiscal surplus. Leaving aside the perversity of booming sectors with all the advantages being granted all the fiscal benefits while a depressed manufacturing industry continues to carry a full tax burden, it would take far more than the availability of the natural resources and a successful RIGI drawing investment in the hundreds of billions for even the primary sector to function optimally.

The supporting infrastructural fabric is being neglected all along the line in the name of the fiscal surplus with Tuesday’s Federal University March highlighting one aspect but there are others – the lower levels of education, the training of skilled labour, housing, deficient roads and transport connections in general with public works taboo and a health system on the verge of collapse among others, not least in the hitherto backward inland provinces with the raw materials for an investment boom.

All these aspects are important but since the mass university protest against renewed cuts was uppermost in this week’s news, it is perhaps worth placing the focus there as a key element in the transition of the workforce from import substitution to sectors centred on export-led growth. Embracing this transition could give the government a more imaginative line of attack on university budgets than the current fiscal approach of blindly slashing across the board while university administrations would be mounting a smarter defence if they proposed new ways of making higher education part of the solution rather than problem, instead of clinging to all existing structures even when obsolete.

After over eight decades of constant rural migration to Greater Buenos Aires, there has recently been an almost invisible shift inland in the opposite direction but rather more than better urban planning will be needed to counter the shantytowns now sprouting up around hinterland population centres. The national government should be sitting down with the mining and oil provinces to work out training programmes for these boom sectors alongside other infrastructural needs but education also needs renovation on a much broader front, bringing us back to the universities.

Both the quantity and quality of Argentina’s public universities are up for discussion – a right which the government would earn if they were ready to pump more funds into areas which could fuel progress instead of just blindly cutting. They could start by asking if Argentina really needs 70 universities (in places like Chilecito or Saladillo, for example, while some Greater Buenos Aires universities are almost on top of each other), closing some down altogether while correcting the underfunding of the best and perhaps even still saving, instead of slashing across the board.

A curriculum geared to professional degrees like law, medicine and architecture could also be adjusted so that Argentina produces more electrical, mining, hydraulic, civil and mechanical engineers, geologists and other technical skills needed for the new sectors. The government could take the initiative here but so could the universities themselves, overcoming their reluctance until now to link up the academic world with the job market. While these jobs would eventually take these graduates inland, there is no real reason why they could not be trained in the numerous universities in and around the capital, thus aiding their survival and easing the acute youth unemployment of Greater Buenos Aires.

Just as Argentina’s need for 70 public universities may be open to question, so is the presence of over 350,000 students at UBA Buenos Aires University. There would be no need for the government to make any explicit cuts if it simply trimmed such numbers by ending free unrestricted admission. Is a chronic student taking up to 15 years to complete studies while enjoying university life really the best investment for the public purse – would not that money be better spent on more scholarships for the brightest and best among the lower classes who cannot afford to remain idle instead of on what is almost invariably middle-class mediocrity?

This is perhaps the “cultural battle” which most needs fighting. Tuesday’s marchers were undoubtedly right in protesting against criminally underpaid lecturers but the government would have a better case if they took the trouble to detect areas where cuts could be justified while ensuring decent spending in others. But all part of a much broader infrastructural neglect perhaps the subject of another editorial.