Two Argentinas, one set of numbers

Walk into a shop in a mid-sized city, talk to someone who worked in construction two years ago, or visit a textile workshop. What you hear when you mention the strong economic figures recently announced by the government is rarely relief. More often it is confusion, sometimes disbelief. How can things be improving and yet feel worse? The economy grew 4.4% in 2025. Inflation has fallen dramatically from the chaos of two years ago. By the usual macroeconomic standards, this is what stabilisation is supposed to look like. The government’s frustration when people refuse to believe the numbers is understandable. They are real, and pointing to them is not dishonest. But Argentina is not experiencing one economy right now. It is experiencing two. One Argentina appears in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures, export statistics and sector reports. It is real and, in several respects, encouraging. The other runs through the everyday economy, the one organised around ordinary work, small businesses and local demand.  That Argentina moves more slowly, spreads across thousands of towns and neighbourhoods, and rarely shows up cleanly in national indicators. It is also where most people actually live. The two rarely overlap. Take growth. Agriculture, mining, energy and parts of finance have expanded rapidly over the past year. They generate value, exports and investment. What they do not generate at least not on the same scale is employment. These are capital-intensive sectors. They can post strong numbers without hiring many people. The sectors that do employ people have been moving in the opposite direction. Commerce, manufacturing and construction are where millions of Argentines work and where income circulates through cities and neighbourhoods.  When they slow down, the effect spreads quickly through the labour market, through local spending, through the kind of economic everyday life that national accounts are slow to capture. That is what explains that in a year in which the economy grew 4.4%, unemployment still rose, reaching 7.5% by the end of 2025. Not a statistical quirk. A structural split. Inflation tells the same story from a different angle. The headline figure for 2025 was 31.5%, a genuine achievement after the price chaos of recent years. No one should dismiss that. Bringing inflation down from where it was is not a minor thing. But no one actually lives in the average. Services rose nearly 43% across the year. Goods rose 26% – below inflation – and durable goods, even less. The gap between those numbers is where the inequality lives. Households whose spending includes goods that can be postponed, like electronics, appliances and imported products, have seen prices stabilize in ways that feel tangible. Households whose spending is dominated by day to day expenditures like rent, transport, utilities and food the sectors that experienced the highest inflation have had a different experience.  Those categories moved faster and consumed a much larger share of income, particularly for families at the lower end of the earnings scale. Therefore, two people can look at the same inflation number and come away with opposite conclusions. One sees stabilisation and thinks the worst may finally be over. The other sees a figure that is not reflected in the bills he or she pays every month.  Neither is wrong. They are simply inhabiting different sections of the same balance sheet. This is not purely a communication problem, and it is not just about politics. Argentina has always been unequal across regions, sectors and income levels.  What is different now is that this unevenness is shaping the headline indicators themselves. The sectors growing happen to be the ones that employ the fewest people. The prices stabilising happen to be the ones most households spend the least on. The recovery is only real for those enjoying its benefits. For many workers, small businesses and local economies scattered across the country, it has not yet arrived where their lives actually happen. The question is no longer whether parts of the economy are improving. They are. The question is whether growth concentrated in a handful of sectors, in a handful of regions, producing a handful of statistical victories, is ever going to reach the majority.