Why Lavagna was the only man for the job

Inside Argentina’s financial crisis | The fall and rise of Argentina | | “Can you pay me before I die?”

I first met Roberto Lavagna more than 25 years ago. When I finished my PhD at Boston University, I worked at FIEL, a small think-tank in Argentina. This was in 1979. I was working on a project aimed at calculating effective protection of the Argentine economy, a subject in vogue in our country at the time. Lavagna had been director of the national board of prices in the mid-1970s, where he put together econometric work essential for the calculations I was working on.