Aldo Ferrer

Aldo Ferrer (April 15, 1927 – March 8, 2016) was an Argentine economist. He was one of the leading proponents of economic nationalism in Argentina.

His turn as chief economist for Argentina's largest province (home to over a third of the population) gave Ferrer national stature, though it also left him out of the halls of power after the UCRI's standard-bearer, President Arturo Frondizi, was forced to resign by conservative opponents in 1962.

Academics Ferrer returned to academics as Professor of Economics at the University of La Plata and at the University of Buenos Aires.

Minister of Economy Growing instability in Argentina led to the removal of General Juan Carlos Onganía as president in June 1970. His replacement, General Roberto M. Levingston, had become a supporter of the Alliance for Progress during his turn in the Frondizi administration as head of Army Intelligence and while stationed in the Argentine Embassy in Washington, DC. Careful to placate conservatives, he appointed an "inflation hawk," Carlos Moyano Llerena, as Minister of the Economy; but, instead relied on the head of the new Ministry of Production, Aldo Ferrer, as his chief economic policy maker. Announcing new subsidies for industry, requirements for a higher domestic component in autos and other large consumer durables and the creation of a national small-business lender (BANADE), Ferrer secured increased collective bargaining rights for Argentine labor (the best-paid and most-unionized in Latin America at the time) and became a household word in Argentina with his ads encouraging consumers to Compre Nacional! ("Buy Domestic").

Later career Ferrer returned to academics and to his work with CLACSO, writing an economic history, The Postwar (1982), and Living Within Our Means (1983), an appeal for alternatives to dependence on foreign investment. Following a financial collapse, Argentina's last dictatorship called for elections in 1983. The winner, Raúl Alfonsín of the centrist Radical Civic Union (UCR), appointed Ferrer President of the Bank of the Province of Buenos Aires, the public, second-largest bank in Argentina. Limited by a shortfall in confidence in the Argentine banking system (whose deposits were dwarfed by Argentine deposits abroad) and growing differences with Alfonsín's conservative economists, Ferrer resigned in 1987.

Contributing regularly to the Economy section of Clarín, Argentina's most important news daily, he became an increasingly renowned opponent of globalization, capturing what he saw as its contradictions in A History of Globalization in 1996, and criticizing its dependence on slave labor in From Columbus to the Internet: Globalization in Latin America (2000). He organized like-minded economists in his new NGO, Grupo Fénix the same year.

The May 2003 election of Peronist Néstor Kirchner following the worst economic debacle in Argentina since 1930 left free market and pro-globalization economists without the friends in Argentine government they had enjoyed for over a decade, leading to increasing state intervention in the Argentine economy. Among the results was the 2004 establishment of Enarsa, a public energy company commissioned to increase oil and gas production and to alleviate future electricity shortages such as the one Argentina suffered in April of that year. He was appointed to the company's Board of Directors in March 2006.

Ferrer was named editor-in-chief of Buenos Aires Económico, a local business and current affairs daily, in 2008, and in December 2010, was appointed Ambassador to France by President Cristina Kirchner. Popular with embassy staff and the sizable community of Argentines in France alike, Ferrer's tenure became known for its gala diplomacy and frequent colloquia of economists. Citing health concerns and a desire to be closer to his daughters in Argentina, he resigned from the post in April 2013 and returned to academia. He died on March 8, 2016.