Episode 20: The economy pt III: Bank Holiday?

Today is... a bank holiday.

Yes, In Argentina they have a whopping 20 bank holidays throughout the year (up to even 26 if you are Jewish) compared to 8 or 9 in the UK. This equates to over 2 extra working weeks that are 'lost' or 'gained', depending on the way you look at things. However, as always, a bugging economical question comes to mind - how can a country riddled with debt, that has major inflation problems and an economy generally heading in totally the wrong direction afford to let its population take so many days off work?

Firstly, we should explore whether or not a bank holiday is good a bad for a country's economy. This isn't so easy, as there are two sides to the coin. Consider a family sending their washing to the laundrette, only to find its closed on the bank holiday - well, they would most probably send it the day after, thus having no impact. Alternatively, consider all of the restaurants in the city financial district - whilst the workers will come back the next day, the bank holiday completely wipes out one day of revenue. In the same way, those working inside those financial offices will have lost a day's worth of revenue for the firm (unless they have anticipated in advance by working overtime etc)

These examples can be applied to a range of other situations. Furthermore, families also tend to use bank holidays for leisure activities. This, then would be good for the economy as cinemas, attractions, theatres and restaurants all reap the benefit - however does this trip now to the local bowling alley mean that Saturday night will be a quite night in front of the TV instead of going out to eat?

Thus, this isn't such an easy question. The Centre for Economics and Business research in the UK (admittedly) recently found that each bank holiday costs the economy £2billion, or more importantly 0.15% of GDP. It may not fully translate, but lets assume this percentage is the same in Argentina - and therefore that 20 bank holidays mean a loss of a whole 3% of GDP.

In a world where most countries are hovering around 0 growth, and where public confidence is destroyed if growth drops even just slightly below 0 ('recession'), is a 3% difference wasted on bank holidays? Either way, I'm not complaining - at least it balances out the meagre 14 days of holiday we get a year!