The sustainability of Argentinian social security: how to measure the deficit of the ANSES (1993-2019)

Abstract

Argentina’s main social security agency, the ANSES, lacks an accurate measurement of its economical result (deficit or surplus). In this work we show how the result, as it is currently measured by ANSES Savings-Investment-Financing account (SIF), suffers from various limitations. The main ones are, that it ignores the co-participation deviated from Argentina’s Provinces to ANSES; which excludes expenditure made on behalf of the Social Development Ministry or the cashpoints of security and defense forces; and that it records the profitability of the Funds of Guaranteed Sustainability (FGS), entirely
reinvested in the Funds as a current income of the agency. We propose a way to measure ANSES economical result since it started functioning in 1993 up to 2019. We show that, starting from an equilibrium in 2014 and a slight deficit in 2015 (-0.8% of GDP), various reforms passed between 2016 and 2019 increased anses deficit up to - 2.6% GDP, the most important one ever registered by the government.