Argentina's Inflation Figures Released Under New Data Collection Practice

On Thursday, the government of Argentina released a new consumer price, which it hopes will tame skeptics that accuse the government of underreporting inflation and restore confidence in official economic data.

The official economic data collection method was adjusted to include prices on goods across the entire country, replacing the old index that only measured inflation in the urban area of Buenos Aires, the country's capital city.

A lack of confidence in the legitimacy of data being reported by the government was partly the cause of the recent hit the Argentine Peso took against the dollar. The hit left Argentines scrambling to exchange their currency and a surge in black market transactions used to thwart government limits on purchasing dollars.

Officially, the January consumer-price index rose 3.7 percent for the month, according to figures released by the Argentine national statistics agency Indec under the new index. Opposition legislators had released privately-researched estimates noting a 4.61 percent rise in January and an increase of 30.78 percent for the year. A Reuters poll of six analysts put the figure at 5.6 percent for the month.

In contrast, December's monthly inflation rate was reported as 1.4 percent with an annual gain of 10.9 percent under the old data collection methods, leading to a censure from the International Monetary Fund for "questionable data."

The change in approach is receiving cautious optimism from financial observers. "The key issue going forward will be whether they are consistent and stay the course because one data point does not make a trend," said Goldman Sachs economist Alberto Ramos to Reuters.

And while the numbers look worse than past figures, restored credibility in the governmental disclosure could actually produce a boon for sales of bonds, which according to Bloomberg returned 8.06 percent this month.

"Argentina finally comes clean and prints a monster month-on-month inflation figure in compliance with the IMF," Donato Guarino of Barclays Plc wrote in an e-mail, according to Bloomberg. "In this case, bad news is good news. A bad inflation number that will trigger a rally."

And that "coming clean" could have some negative side effects down the road.

"While the new index will win the government some plaudits with economists, it could complicate things politically for (President) Kirchner by explicitly recognizing that prices are rising far faster than the government had previously admitted, and raising the bar for wage demands from unions and other workers," observes Shane Romig of the Wall Street Journal.