Argentina to lay off 50,000 civil servants as part of belt-tightening

Argentina's government plans to lay off 50,000 civil servants as part of a belt-tightening drive launched in December, Argentine President Javier Milei said Wednesday, reported Xinhua.

In a speech on the 10th Latin American Business Forum, Milei touted his drastic cutbacks in public spending, saying "unlike others, which with half-point austerity measures ended up blown off course, we made a seven-point adjustment."

His policy proposal to rein in all public spending to promote pension reform can make its way through Congress, he said , adding that the proposed change would mean more expenditure for the fiscal coffers.

"Any time the fiscal degenerates of politics want to break the fiscal balance, I am telling them now, I have said it before, I am saying it now, and I am going to repeat it ad nauseam -- I am going to veto everything," Milei said.

Since his inauguration on Dec. 10, 2023, the government has cut the number of ministries "and the entire structure of government has been reduced by half," he said.

"We are going to end up laying off 75,000 people. We have already (laid off) 25,000," he told business leaders, investors and economists.

While his austerity measures have been rejected by the political opposition, labor confederations, unions and social organizations, Milei has defended them as being necessary.

"Never has so much been done in six months as we are doing," he said. "We are not only putting the economy in order ... but we are also ending corruption, and that is why the political sector is raging," said Milei.

The South American country registered an inflation rate of 289.4 percent in April year on year and a rate of 8.8 percent in April, the first single-digit monthly figure since October, the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INDEC) reported in May.

Economic activity, meanwhile, fell 8.4 percent year on year in March and shrank 5.3 percent in the first quarter, according to recent data from the INDEC.