In the short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges tells of an imaginary world so minutely described that it actually comes to exist. Argentina’s government began a similar exercise when it first doctored the country’s economic statistics in 2007. The idea that flattered growth or inflation data might ultimately manifest itself as physical reality is something not even the country’s former military dictators attempted. The result today is an economic wonderland that cannot survive if the country is to return successfully to international capital markets, as it plans.

The meddling began for obvious reasons: one-third of government spending is inflation-linked, so under-reporting price increases reduces its bills. But then the fantasy begat further fantasy. Unions now use the “housewives index” when negotiating wage increases as official data are so poor. Officially, the Argentine economy is some 10 per cent larger than in June 2007, just before Cristina Fernández became president. In fact, it is probably 5 per cent smaller, Capital Economics estimates. At the height of absurdity, computer-generated estimates of the economy’s size derived from the same supply or demand data no longer matched.