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The election of 1989 marked the first time in more than 60 years that a civilian president had handed power to an elected successor.

the repeated recessions of the 1970s and 1980s, the hyperinflation of 1989-90, the economic crisis of 2001 and now the possibility of another crisis to come.

But three deep-lying explanations help to illuminate the country’s diminishment. Firstly, Argentina may have been rich 100 years ago but it was not modern. That made adjustment hard when external shocks hit. The second theory stresses the role of trade policy. Third, when it needed to change, Argentina lacked the institutions to create successful policies.

Railways transformed the economics of agriculture and refrigerated shipping made it possible to export meat on an unprecedented scale: between 1900 and 1916 Argentine exports of frozen beef rose from 26,000 tonnes to 411,000 tonnes a year. But Argentina mainly consumed technology from abroad rather than inventing its own.

External shocks duly materialised, which leads to the second theory for Argentine decline: trade policy.

Argentina raised import tariffs from an average of 16.7% in 1930 to 28.7% in 1933. Reliance on Britain, another country in decline, backfired as Argentina’s favoured export market signed preferential deals with Commonwealth countries.

an existing policy of import substitution deepened; the share of trade as a percentage of GDP continued to fall.

High food prices meant big profits for farmers but empty stomachs for ordinary Argentines. Open borders increased farmers’ takings but sharpened competition from abroad for domestic industry.

“One-third of the country—the commodities industry, engineers and regional industries like wine and tourism—is ready to compete,” says Sergio Berensztein, a political analyst. “Two-thirds are not.”

Property rights are insecure

Statistics cannot be trusted: Argentina was due this week to unveil new inflation data in a bid to avoid censure from the IMF for its wildly undercooked previous estimates.

hort-termism is embedded in the system

“We have spent 50 years thinking about maintaining government spending, not about investing to grow,” says Fernando de la Rúa, a former president who resigned during the 2001 crisis.

The country’s Vaca Muerta (“Dead Cow”) shale-oil and gasfield is estimated to be the world’s third-largest. If Argentina can attract foreign capital, the money could start flowing within a decade.

The country of 4.7 million people climbed seven spots to 102nd in the World Bank’s annual “Doing Business” report this year, lagging behind China, Vietnam and Namibia. Moody’s Investors Service lowered its outlook on Costa Rica to negative from neutral in September, citing a rising debt burden and widening budget deficit. Moody’s rates the country Baa3, putting it in the same category as Turkey and Iceland.

In a Bloomberg survey published last month, Costa Rica was ranked fourth behind Russia, Argentina and Ukraine on a list of countries confronting the biggest loss of investor confidence. The survey cited data including the rising cost of credit default swaps and the currency’s performance against the dollar.

California-based Intel, whose processors run more than 80 percent of personal computers shipped worldwide every year, originally chose to establish operations in Costa Rica after studying sites in Indonesia, Thailand, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Mexico, according to a 2000 case study by Harvard University’s Center for International Development. The company’s $600 million investment at the time represented about 4.2 percent of GDP, prompting the company’s then-Vice President Bob Perlman to say Intel’s arrival was like “putting a whale in a swimming pool,” according to the study.

n 2013, about 21 percent of Costa Rica’s exports of goods came from Intel, according to investment promotion agency CINDE

Today, Germany grudgingly does the minimum needed to keep the euro area intact. If exit to emulate Greece becomes an attractive proposition, Germany will be put on the spot—and the magnanimity it shows in place of its current miserliness will be the ultimate test of how much it values the euro area.

ransfers from a Luxembourg company to the US would have typically been subject to a withholding tax. Last year, after attracting the attention of Spanish tax authorities, Exxon quietly closed down the operation.

“Normally you would have to pay a 10 per cent withholding tax at source to send profits to the US,

Spain introduced the ETVE in the mid-1990s to encourage foreign investment, and better compete with Luxembourg and Holland for international companies seeking tax-efficient European holding structures. It also allowed for foreign companies to take advantage of Spain’s strong network of bilateral tax treaties with countries in Latin America, such as Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, which can offer more favourable tax rates than other countries. Once the ETVE has been established all overseas dividends that are paid into it are exempt from tax in Spain, and can be easily moved on to a final destination, providing a small number of conditions have been met. Most importantly, corporation tax must have been paid in the country of origin on the dividends being transferred, and companies using ETVEs to house shareholdings in foreign subsidiaries must not be resident in any country identified by Spain as a tax haven.

In fact, Linthal is an ETVE used by Ambev, a subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch InBev, the Belgian-based brewer, to distribute dividends from several Latin American beer brands, such as Argentina’s Quilmes and Cervecería Boliviana Nacional, to its holding company in Brazil.

The next headache should be contagion.

What has been offered to Greece cannot be refused to other Eurozone governments

An alternative to spreading mutual underwriting is debt monetisation.

The ECB does not buy assets outright, so the loss would be borne by the banks that used the Greek bonds as collateral for repo operations with the ECB. But banks are the ECB’s counterparties; if they default, the loss is the ECB’s.

Was there no other way? It would have been very easy to let Greece go straight to the IMF months ago and reschedule its debt with IMF’s assistance. This would have been a partial default, and the haircut could have been quite small. Most banks that are exposed to the Greek debt should have been able to withstand such losses. With a grace period of, say, three years, Greece would have had the breathing space that the latest plan tries so hard to organise