Proving inflation when there are no official stats has been very hard during the last 6 years in Argentina. One of the problems we had was that as inflation increased but was not recognized in official stats, more and more pesos bills were printed, and the highest amount was the bill of 100 pesos. So the ATMs were stuffed with those bills and lots of them came out of service again and again. The argument of the former government was that as there was no inflation there was no need to increase the amount of the pesos bills.
There was another problem, the corruption case in which the former vice president Amado Boudou was suspected to influence the sell of the bill´s printing press Ciccone Calcográfica to a company run by his supposed figurehead.
So how could we measure and monitor this?
The Central Bank communicates the quantity of bills that conform the monetary base in Argentina in pesos. This communications are bi weekly and in PDF, so as we detected them , we scraped all these communications, called “circulars”, and built a dataset.
To build this dataset first we have to OCR the PDF and then add the new rows to the dataset in XLS.
The dataset is based in quantity of bills in pesos per each amount with basic analysis
Then we calculated the amount of bills per quantities and analyze
The share of each bill in the total amount of monetary base in pesos.
And we built this Tableau that demonstrates the raise of the 100 pesos bill and the new offect of the 500 pesos bill in the total amount.
Some ATMs now expend 500 pesos bills, and it´s not easy to find those as now , in 2017, we reached a 4% of the total quantity of bills in 500 pesos bills.
We reused this visualization more than 4 times already and rebuilt it for future publications as we value this dataset as an input to calculate its influence in inflation and to measure the monetary issue of pesos in Central Bank that affects our economy in general.
Case 1
How many bills of each amount circulate in Argentina since 2003
http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1914111-cuantos-billetes-de-cada-valor-circulan-en-la-argentina
Case 2
A month after its launch, how many 500 pesos bills are there in the streets?
http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1921959-a-un-mes-de-su-lanzamiento-cuantos-billetes-de-500-hay
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