When statistics were born in Argentina, with the 1869 census giving the country its first precise figure (a population of 1,830,214 inhabitants), Benjamin Disraeli – to whom the quotation in the headline is attributed (“Lies, damned lies and statistics”) – already had his first stint in No. 10 Downing Street as British prime minister under his belt.
Talking of censuses, perhaps the strongest criticism which could be made of departing INDEC national statistics bureau director Marco Lavagna is that he made a pig’s ear of the 11th and most recent census in 2022 but strangely enough, this has failed to feature among the ex post facto rationalisations of his exit last Monday, as explained in government circles. This census was a case of third time lucky after the first figure (always assuming the final count to be correct). In the same month as the census (May, 2022) a provisional figure of 47,327,407 was announced, falling inexplicably to 46,044,703 inhabitants early in 2023. The total then edged back up to 46,234,830 around the time of the general elections at the other end of that year before dipping to a “final” 45,892,285. These huge discrepancies have never been explained.
For all we know, new INDEC chief Pedro Lines might be a far superior statistician to Lavagna but image counts for more than substance these days and by straddling Frente de Todos and libertarian administrations in his six years at the helm (or 2,227 days, if we are going to be statistically precise) Lavagna gave official number-crunching a credibility which has now been gratuitously jeopardised. Having already held back the new methodology for measuring inflation ahead of last October’s midterms, the economic team were pushing the envelope when they postponed it again.
Since the differences between old and new methods are minimal when it comes to the January inflation to be announced next week (reportedly 0.1 percent but unknown), government anxieties are perhaps best understood in future terms. Services bulk large in the new methodology (which reduces the food component from 40 to 32 percent, for example, also adversely affecting the figures for the reduction of poverty) and if Economy Minister Luis Caputo has confirmed finally ending the disarray in relative prices by some sharp adjustments in utility billing (held back last year for the midterms), it would be difficult to place inflation on the downward path it has failed to follow since last May, never mind the 2026 Budget figure of 10.1 percent. Furthermore, the Central Bank has finally set out this year to accumulate reserves but the simultaneous policy shift of seeking to end bond issue rollovers in debt repayment will strain those reserves, requiring even more pesos to hoard those greenbacks and hence risking more inflation. Another argument against updating the methodology.
The blow to confidence from this institutionally messy political interference in the formation of statistics (even if child’s play compared to the Kirchnerite fudging of the figures) remains to be seen in the future – the rest of this column will be devoted to the past since that 1869 census.
Almost a century passed from that first census until the creation of the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos (INDEC) by a military government in 1968. That initial census was followed by a system of trade statistics being perfected between 1870 and 1879 for Customs, the core of Argentine revenue since colonial times. Then came compiling statistics for a fast-growing immigration as from 1876. The first national statistical office, which was to undergo various reincarnations and name changes, came in 1886. That first census for people was followed by the first census for cattle in 1888. There were four more pre-INDEC national censuses in 1895, 1914, 1947 and 1960. The 1904 census in this city was the first to employ female enumerators. The Great Depression after 1929 led to the first unemployment statistics in 1932, followed by an industrial census in 1935. Thereafter there was scant expansion into new areas before the creation of INDEC in 1968.
The first director of INDEC was Juan Vital Sourrouille, later to become famous as the economy minister of the 1985 Austral Plan – the 1970 census enumerating 23,364,431 Argentines marked the institute’s debut. The military government imposed a trusteeship to keep a closer eye on its creation in 1971, also the year in which the Permanent Household Survey (EPH, in its Spanish acronym), which forms the basis of INDEC data collection to this day, was hatched. The return of a Peronist government in 1973 saw INDEC quickly placed under the wing of the Economy Ministry, from which it has never really since departed. INDEC performed the seventh census for the military junta in 1980, yielding a total of 27,949,480 inhabitants. Basically the same routine through the return to democracy until the next census in 1991 (32,615,528 Argentines). In 1999, INDEC began coordinating its work with European statistical offices with a view to the Mercosur-European Union free-trade agreement which is only now becoming reality.
And so to this century with its first census in 2001 (36,260,130 inhabitants). In 2003 EPH data collection became a continuous process for the first time with quarterly publication instead of twice a year. And then in 2007 came not INDEC’s finest hour but its most famous in the last year of the Néstor Kirchner Presidency – exactly 19 years ago today, Graciela Bevacqua, a professional statistician, was replaced by the Kirchnerite hack Beatriz Paglieri, followed in August by Ana María Edwin as director until 2014. But both the latter were entirely under the thumb of the notorious domestic trade secretary Guillermo Moreno. Six years of falsification followed, often on the basis of taking price controls as the real figure with the official poverty figures indeed lower than Germany (Aníbal Fernández was not technically wrong), with the legal persecution of INDEC staff and economists (including Lavagna) publishing alternative inflation figures. Ironically enough, Néstor Kirchner – who first unleashed this reign of terror – died on the day of the 2010 census, October 27, 2010 (40,117,096 Argentines). In 2015 Mauricio Macri won the Presidency and INDEC started returning to honest statistical reporting under Jorge Todesca, who ran INDEC until just seven weeks before his death from cancer, handing over to Lavagna in the penultimate day of 2019.
Six years later, where does INDEC go from here?
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