Aportes para un enfoque de derechos humanos en las políticas monetarias – El caso argentino en pandemia

Abstract

This article proposes the need and feasibility of using a human rights approach to analyze, design and implement monetary policy (MP) at the national level, laying out the interdisciplinary analytical foundations for its use with respect to the MP applied during the pandemic in Argentina. It first explains why monetary policies are precisely that, “policies”, and not mere neutral and technical instruments to regulate prices in the market. It describes the human rights obligations of central banks and the IMF in terms of MP, and how these policies can impact on the economic and social rights of the population through their incidence on employment levels, poverty and inequality, among other variables. In order to understand the subtle causal channels that may exist between MPs and human rights, contemporary theoretical debates surrounding currency and MPs are presented, including Monetarism, New Classical Economics, New Keynesian Economics, Modern Monetary Theory and Structuralism. In order to empirically anchor the theoretical development, Argentina is taken as a case to propose an analytical framework for the investigation of the dynamics of the variables to be considered in a more exhaustive case study research, highlighting both the countercyclical MPs implemented during the pandemic, which allowed for a rapid expansion of fiscal space to ensure the provision of essential public services and contain the fall in economic activity, as well as the post-pandemic return to an orthodox monetary policy which, together with a contractionary fiscal strategy required by the IMF, is having adverse effects on social inclusion and other indicators reflecting the human rights situation.