The national government’s road map relies on the take-off of sectors extracting natural resources to drive the real economy. Government offices are dominated by the premise that the dynamism of Argentina’s energy and mining sectors will produce a trickledown effect capable of transferring investments and population to new productive centres, stabilising the macro-economic variables.
But far from the diagnosis limiting the productive crisis to the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area (AMBA), the destruction of companies and registered jobs is hitting inland provinces too, including those once exhibited by the Casa Rosada as “promising” regions for its economic model.
Almost two-thirds of the country’s departments (318 out of a total of 498) report job losses between the September 2023 and September 2025 period, according to a new analysis by the CETyD (Centro de Estudios de la Educación, el Trabajo y el Desarrollo) think tank.
While 38,000 jobs were created in 176 departments over the period, that figure did not compensate for the 183,000 jobs lost elsewhere.
Less jobs, more closures
Jurisdictions previously presented as beneficiaries of the Milei model are also showing falls. Neuquén and Río Negro were the only two provinces which managed to create registered private-sector jobs paying salaries.
A numerical analysis of Vaca Muerta region shows that over half of Neuquén departments suffered a net loss of jobs. Growth was drawn to the department of Confluencia, which supplied 7,551 jobs (an increase of eight percent), compensating the retraction in the rest of the province.
This scenario is repeated when measuring corporate demography. El Monitor Mensual de Empresas magazine, published by the organisation Fundar, details a level of corporate closures covering the entire hinterland.
According to the survey, since this government took office late in 2023, the three provinces with the most productive units shutting down were La Rioja, Catamarca and Chaco.
The case of Catamarca breaks with the projections – despite its lithium (singled out by the government as key to bringing in investments), the district leads the worst indices of company survival. In the last month of the survey, only three provinces displayed growth in their list of companies, headed by Formosa.
The ‘trickledown’ effect
Argentina’s current economic team defends the territorial impact of these investments. Deregulation & State Transformation Minister Federico Sturzenegger spelled out the demographic projection by assuring that “Neuquén will have a population of 1.5 million in the next 30 years,” pointing to the opening up the economy with the arrival of capital.
Deputy Economy Minister José Luis Daza also defends the export of primary products and confronts analysts who warn against macro-economic fragmentation.
“This strikes my attention because I’ve even heard some economists saying: ‘Yes, the growth has to be for everybody, not just for Vaca Muerta and the miners and that’s it.’ They do not understand all the interrelationship of each one of these sectors with the rest of the economy,” affirmed the official.
For the Economy Ministry’s second-in-command, the hard currency entering from these items will act as a motor for a cycle of recovery.
“We won’t be a country with a few miners and a few guys working with oil. We’ll be a country of engineers, professors, technicians and accountants. All this wealth will raise income throughout the country,” forecast Daza.
According to his perspective, the exports will guarantee exchange rate stability, force interest rates down and leverage the expansion of credit to revive different productive branches.
“You enter into a virtuous circle, that’s what’s happened in the rest of the world. When you do things badly, we all end up in the same place – when you do things well, we all advance in the same direction. There is no reason for Argentina to be different,” he indicated.
Norte Grande employment bleeding
The battered productive fabric has its asterisks in the Norte Grande, the Northwest and the Northeast, where the data question the hypothesis of a hinterland sheltered by the regional economies. Since the change of government, the collapse of companies was headed by Chaco, La Rioja and Catamarca, the three provinces with the greatest destruction of productive units nationwide.
The haemorrhage of shuttered firms pardons nobody in the rest of the region, dragging down the register of companies in Jujuy (down 4.79 percent), Salta (down 4.03 percent) and Tucumán (down 2.77 percent).
On the job front, the dynamics of these provinces reflects an enormous internal disparity which does not compensate for the overall red ink. The employment map shows that while some micro-regions have staged a statistical rebound – like the department of El Carmen in Jujuy (with the creation of 1,572 jobs) or Yerba Buena in Tucumán (1,493 new jobs) – most northern districts have deepened the expulsion of workers from formal private-sector employment.
Without the motor of national public works and with a depressed mass consumer demand, the absorption of labour in northern Argentina is reduced to isolated enclaves which do not budge the provincial needle.
Shuttered regional economies
Within the industrial sector a sustained fall in the activity of regional economies has been registered. The Fundar report enumerates several cases in recent weeks which illustrate the decline in production.
In Entre Ríos Province , a plant of Granja Tres Arroyos, Argentina’s main poultry firm, has been paralysed indefinitely, thus placing 950 jobs at risk after another plant in the province closed down.
In Santa Fe, Adient auto parts manufacturers have closed down their factory in Pueblo Esther, affecting 70 workers, instead importing their car seats from Brazil. Citroën has stopped producing cars in this country to concentrate regionally on their Brazilian and Uruguayan plants.
Slumping consumer demand depresses local circuits. In La Rioja, the textile company Mazalosa – the manufacturer for such brands as Portsaid and Desiderata – have closed down their plant at the Industrial Park, leaving 20 workers jobless.
The cuts also hit the steel company Leval S.A. in San Nicolás with 52 workers fired, as well as multinational firms like the British Welding Alloys and the German agrochemical company Helm, which has discontinued its local operations.
