Buenos Aires.- A little over 30,000 companies have closed their doors in Argentina since the ultraliberal Javier Milei took office at the end of 2023, with policies that have especially affected the commerce sector and several industrial branches.
“Since Milei took office, 30,633 companies have been lost, 6% of the total. It is the worst drop in the first 30 months of a government,” indicated the think tank Fundar in a recent report, with data up to last May.
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In the fifth month of the year alone, 2,371 companies closed, at a rate of 76 per day.
According to data from Fundar, there are currently a total of 481,724 companies in Argentina, the lowest number in nearly twenty years, even below the level recorded in 2021 following the COVID pandemic and the severe health restrictions that hit the South American country’s economy.
“The closure of companies is much higher than in other periods. There are several reasons, but all are linked to the economic policy of the current Government, which proposes a neoliberalism of indiscriminate economic opening,” economist Hernán Bergstein, a professor at the National University of Lanús and an expert on SMEs, told EFE.
The Center for Argentine Political Economy (CEPA), which coincides with the figure of 30,633 companies lost so far during the Milei administration, indicated days ago in a report that the most affected sector is commerce, with a loss of 8,408 productive units.
Other activities also recorded significant declines: the transportation and storage services sector lost 6,733; real estate services, 4,098; and manufacturing industry, 4,020.
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Broken chain
Bergstein pointed out to EFE that the indiscriminate opening of low-cost imports of dubious quality constitutes “unfair competition,” particularly for industrial SMEs, which end up closing or barely surviving.
The decline in the purchasing power of wages in real terms in the face of still-high inflation -33.8% year-on-year last July- has led to a reduction in consumption.
“In this scenario, companies reduce their production until they close because they have no demand. There are also fewer companies supplying goods and services to the State due to the fiscal policy of reducing public spending,” explained Bergstein.
According to the economist, the process of the disappearance of productive units is also influenced by a ‘transfer’ phenomenon: “Companies that have lower income transfer this situation to their suppliers, and these, with fewer sales, in turn also begin to close. The payment chain is being broken in all sectors and this affects thousands of SMEs and their workers”.
The closure of companies and businesses has, in fact, a direct impact on the labor market: according to CEPA, so far during Milei’s administration, 411,613 formal jobs have been destroyed, at a rate of 450 per day.
The sector most affected in terms of job losses was the manufacturing industry, with a reduction of 97,312 workers as of last May.
Consulted a couple of weeks ago about this phenomenon, Milei assured in an interview that many of the companies that are closing are made up of a single person, that “the amount of employment went up” and that consumption is at record levels.
Companies in insolvency proceedings
Another phenomenon that evidences the serious crisis that a good part of Argentina’s productive fabric is going through is the growing number of preventive insolvency proceedings, a judicial process that is initiated at the request of a company that has incurred in cessation of payments and seeks to avoid bankruptcy.
According to a report by the entity Industriales Pymes Argentinos (IPA), 190 preventive insolvency proceedings were opened in the commercial courts of Buenos Aires in 2025, 131.7% more than in 2023, while 92 proceedings have already been initiated between February and April 2026.
“We had warned that this year we were going to reach the closure of more than a thousand SMEs, but the pace we are seeing of the degradation of the local economy and the filings for bankruptcy proceedings show us that the damage to the productive fabric is much worse,” stated the president of IPA, Daniel Rosato.
