The purpose of this paper is to link the effects of Argentina’s external debt with its ecological effects, from a perspective that combines ecological economics with political economics. This link is established through the concept of ecological debt, understood as the debt that central countries owe to peripheral countries due to their production and consumption patterns. To calculate this debt, Argentine exports from 1961 to 2018 are analyzed through different prices implicit in the ecological footprint. This allows to measure the ecological debt/credit in the case of Argentina and to establish a comparison with the external debt.

The main purpose of this paper is to link the effects of Argentina's external debt with its ecological effects, from a perspective that combines ecological economics with political economics. This link is established through the main concept of ecological debt. Although four elements of ecological debt have been historically recognized –carbon debt, environmental liabilities, export of toxic waste and biopiracy– this paper analyzes a fifth element of ecological debt, understood as the debt that central countries owe to peripheral countries due to their production and consumption patterns (Paredis et al., 2004).

In this regard, the very concept of ecological debt/credit itself is linked to the concept of ecologically unequal exchange, understood as a one-way net transfer of materials and energy from the peripheral countries to the central ones (Peinado, 2018). Thanks to this concept it is possible to combine external debt with ecological debt, since Argentina's obligation to pay the external debt and its interest forces it to generate a monetary surplus, which mostly comes from a reprimarized export basket with the resulting ecologically unequal exchange (Mora et al., 2021).

Thus, this paper analyzes Argentine exports from 1961 to 2018 through different prices implicit in the ecological footprint. These implicit prices allow us to quantify the environmental impact and to compare exports corrected by these prices with the size of the external debt. The purpose of this calculation is not to put a monetary value on nature, but rather to raise the visibility of the concept of ecological debt/credit and to try to stimulate reflection among those who only know how to evaluate in terms of foreign exchange.

The purpose of recognizing the ecological debt through this method of calculation is to hope that in the future, external debt negotiations will include debt relief mechanisms or debt swaps for those peripheral countries that are debtors in monetary terms, but creditors in ecological terms.

The paper is divided into four parts. The first section provides a historical introduction to the concept and methods used to calculate ecological debt. The second section explains the calculation method used in this paper. The third section then presents the results obtained, in other words, the measurement of the ecological debt/credit for Argentina and its comparison with the external debt. Finally, the final conclusions are presented.

Although the concept of ecological debt was developed in the 1990s, only a few scientific articles have been published on its conceptualization and calculation methodology. In this section, we present the background in two parts: first, we will describe the conceptual evolution and, second, we will describe the methodologies that have been applied over time.

Most of the literature consulted agrees that the term was coined by Latin American Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), although European contributions are also highlighted. Specifically, at least two reports on ecological debt were published in 1992: “Ecological Debt” by Robleto and Marcelo (1992) and “Miljöskulden” by Jernelöv (1992). The authors of these reports on Chile and Sweden, respectively, although contemporary, are also quite different in approach and content. For example, while Robleto and Marcelo's report was a contribution by the Chilean Institute of Political Ecology (IEP) to the global environmental negotiations at the Rio Summit, Jernelöv's report was written for the Swedish Environmental Advisory Council and was largely intended for a national audience (Warlenius et al., 2015).

Since then, NGO networks have adopted the concept and started to campaign with it. Based on this logic, ecological debt is presented as a political tool to counterbalance the growing external debt of countries in the global South. In this regard, Martinez Alier wrote an article on ecological debt in 1997, in which he identifies two types of relationships with external debt. The first relationship "between external debt and ecological debt is the demand for ecological debt, payable on account of underpriced exports (since prices do not include various social and environmental, local and global costs) and on account of environmental services provided for free" (Martinez Alier, 1997, p. 157). The second relationship pointed out by the author is based on the fact that the payment of the external debt and its interest leads to the plundering of nature. This reasoning is based on the fact that although the countries of the South could generate a greater exportable surplus to obtain foreign currency and pay the debt with better levels of productivity, in general this does not happen, but rather exhaustible resources are destroyed and levels of social debt are higher (Martínez Alier, 1997).

This link between external and ecological debt contradicts the principles of the Ricardian theory of comparative advantage and introduces a new type of unequal exchange between countries: ecological unequal exchange. Since then, this concept has been quantified and conceptualized by numerous authors such as Hornborg (1998), Andersson and Lindroth (2001), Pérez Rincón (2003), Hermele (2010), Belloni and Peinado (2013) and Peinado (2015 and 2018).

Like Martínez Alier (1997), and returning to the concept of ecologically unequal exchange, Schatan (1998) affirms that one of the main components of ecological debt is the plundering of natural resources through their undervalued sale. Specifically, Schatan defines ecological debt as:

that which has been accumulated by the North, especially by the most industrialized countries, in relation to the Third World countries, through the plundering of natural resources through their undervalued sale, through environmental pollution, through the free use of their genetic resources, or through the free occupation of their environmental space for the disposal of greenhouse gases or other accumulated and eliminated wastes (1998, p. 18).

This link between ecological debt and "unequal trade" led several NGOs to call for the cancellation of external debt in Johannesburg in 1999 (Ecological Action, 1999) and to launch the Southern Peoples Ecological Debt Creditors Alliance (SPEDCA) in 2000 (Donoso, 2004; Paredis et al., 2004).

All these issues and the concept of ecological debt are summarized in one of the first books on the subject: Ecological Debt (2003), prepared by the Collective for the Diffusion of Ecological Debt (CDE), which defines ecological debt as: "the debt that industrialized countries owe to other countries for the historical and ongoing plunder of natural resources, the exported environmental impacts, and the free use of the global environmental space to dispose of their waste" (CDE, 2003, p. 13).

It is further argued that ecological debt has four specific elements: Carbon debt –debt acquired through the disproportionate pollution of the atmosphere by industrialized countries due to their significant gas emissions–, Biopiracy –the intellectual appropriation of ancestral knowledge related to seeds, use of medicinal and other plants carried out by laboratories of industrialized countries and modern agribusiness, for which they charge royalties–, Environmental debt –debt acquired through the extraction of natural resources due to poorly paid exports–, and the export of toxic wastes originating in industrialized countries and deposited in the poorest countries (CDE, 2003; Martinez Alier, 2007).In addition, it is argued that ecological debt has four specific elements: carbon debt –debt acquired by the disproportionate contamination of the atmosphere by industrialized countries due to their significant gas emissions—, biopiracy –the intellectual appropriation of ancestral knowledge related to seeds, the use of medicinal and other plants carried out by laboratories in industrialized countries and modern agribusiness, and for which they charge royalties—, environmental liabilities –debts acquired from the extraction of natural resources due to poorly paid exports— and the export of toxic waste originating in industrialized countries and deposited in the poorest countries (CDE, 2003; Martinez Alier, 2007).

Complementing this document, the Center for Sustainable Development (CDO) of the University of Ghent, Belgium, conducted a background study and conceptualization of the concept in 2004 and 2008. In it, the authors state that:

The ecological debt of a country consists of (1) the ecological damage caused by country A in other countries or in areas under the jurisdiction of other countries as a result of its production and consumption patterns, (2) and/or the ecological damage historically caused by country A in ecosystems outside its national jurisdiction as a result of its production and consumption patterns, and (3) the use or exploitation of ecosystems or ecosystem goods and services by country A over time at the expense of the equal rights to those ecosystems of other countries or individuals (Paredis et al., 2004, p. 50).

A characteristic feature of this definition is that it maintains the level of debt at the country level and does not address the ecological debt of private entities. A second factor is that countries are either debtors or creditors (there is no reference to center-periphery as in the Latin American definitions). However, the authors point out that in practice, developed countries are usually debtors, while developing countries are creditors. Third, the term "over time" gives the definition a historical component that also underlies the definitions cited above. Finally, there is a central feature that will be discussed in the methodology, which is based on the fact that to measure ecological debt one has to measure the different components of the definition: first, the ecological damage caused in other countries, and second, the use of ecosystems and their services at the expense of other countries or people (even without causing damage).

Another conceptual definition that enriches the debate on ecological debt is the notion of socio-ecological subsidy (Rice, 2009). This author states that the development of central countries has been heavily subsidized by peripheral countries, which in turn is determined by the appropriation and degradation of common goods by the former. In this respect, the socio-ecological subsidy is a broader concept than the ecological debt mentioned above, since it includes both the undervalued sale of natural capital and labor (unequal exchange and ecologically unequal exchange) and the explicit plunder of natural capital and labor (accumulation through dispossession and slavery plus migration) (Rice, 2009).

This socio-environmental subsidy generally flows from the periphery to the center, thus allowing a decoupling of the development trajectories of the center and the periphery. Studying this unequal exchange allows us to explain much of why the periphery has been unable to develop and how this underdevelopment has subsidized the development of the center.

This paper focuses on the ecological debt, understood as the debt that certain countries owe to Argentina as a result of international trade, which makes it possible to dissociate the production and consumption patterns of other countries. This dimension of the concept allows us to link it to the notion of ecologically unequal exchange, understood as:

the situation derived from international trade in which peripheral countries export goods with a high content of their natural resources –in terms of materials and energy– in exchange for goods produced in central countries, which have a lower content of natural resources –and therefore imply a lower transfer of materials and energy– (Peinado, 2018, pp. 66-67).

The link between ecological debt and ecologically unequal exchange makes it possible to unify external debt with ecological debt, since Argentina's obligation to pay the external debt and its interest requires a monetary surplus that comes, in part, from a reprimarized export basket and from this ecologically unequal exchange (Mora et al., 2021).

All methodologies for calculating ecological debt are largely based on the ecological debt/credits that exist in international trade. In other words, they use definitions such as those of Schatan (1998) or Paredis et al. (2004). Beyond this division, the different methodologies used to calculate the ecological debt debate among themselves whether it is necessary to monetize the ecological debt or simply to express it in other units of measurement, such as the amount of carbon dioxide emissions, global hectares, or tons of a product. This debate creates tensions in the discussion of the use of chrematistic indicators and the role of prices in ecological economics.

Most authors affirm that monetary language is understandable for institutions and companies, useful in a legal context, allows the redistribution of the benefits of a polluting activity, creates an incentive not to pollute or at least to take precautions, establishes a symbolic value of financial compensation to recognize the rights of the affected population, and presents a counterargument to the payment of external debt, which is also expressed in monetary terms (Torras, 2003; Pengue, 2006; Villalba, 2008).

However, there are contradictions in these statements, even among ecological economists themselves. The CDE (2003) and Villalba himself (2008) present arguments against the use of chrematistic¹ indicators to solve socio-environmental problems. This allows us to illustrate that there is a constant tension among ecological economists between the breadth of the approach and its usefulness, and an important pragmatism.

With regard to the methodologies used by the different authors, three groups stand out according to the method of calculation: those who use the carbon debt estimation, those who use the nutrient footprint, and those who opt for the environmental space or ecological footprint. This paper focuses on the last group: the ecological debt calculated using the Ecological Footprint.

One of the pioneering studies for the analysis of ecological debt based on Ecological Footprint or Ecological Space is the work of Torras (2003), which incorporates the notion of ecological deficit through the biophysical indicator of Ecological Footprint. For this author, ecological debt is "the monetary equivalent of a country's ecological deficit, and ecological transfer is the monetary compensation that externally indebted countries receive from ecologically indebted countries" (Torras, 2003, p. 2164). To calculate these two variables, we first estimate the ecological debt to be distributed among the countries receiving the transfer in terms of area units, thanks to data from the Living Planet Report (WWF, 2000), and then convert these area units into dollar values to calculate the compensation or transfer.

The first step in this methodology is to calculate the ecological deficit on which such transfers are based. An ecological deficit occurs when a country has an ecological footprint that exceeds its bio-capacity. Countries that are ecological debtors have an "appropriate load capacity" (ACC), which indicates the biocapacity imported at the expense of other countries. Only industrialized countries were considered as ecological debtors, since most of the externally indebted countries lack the means to make a transfer.

The second step is to calculate how much of the ecological deficit should be transferred to countries with ecological surpluses. For this purpose, an ACC-ecological deficit ratio of 5-10% was estimated, which means that 90-95% of the ecological deficit is explained by poor spatial distribution. To allocate the amount of ecological transfers, Torras (2003) chooses total exports and population as variables: the higher the level of exports, the higher the economic interdependence with the rest of the world and the higher the biocapacity transfers from underdeveloped countries to support consumption in rich countries. Meanwhile, countries with large populations receive a proportionally greater transfer, because it is assumed that all people living in a country with an ecological surplus should benefit equally.

The author concludes that underdeveloped and indebted countries benefit from an ecological transfer scheme, in many cases offsetting their entire outstanding external debt. He also warns that the calculations are understated because of conservative assumptions about environmental valuation and the magnitude of material flow transfers from undeveloped to developed countries.

One year later, Paredis et al. (2004), taking into account the work of Torras (2003), calculated the ecological debt in two parts: first, the ecological damage caused in other countries, and second, the use of ecosystems and ecosystem services at the expense of other countries or people (even if no damage is caused). To estimate ecological damage, they use the DPSIR² framework and material flow analysis (MFA). This analysis provides the necessary information to track where the consumption and production patterns of the country under study have an impact. The methodology used for this indicator was to calculate the Total Material Requirement (TMR) of a socio-economic system, which includes the cumulative volume of raw materials extracted from nature for a country's economic activities, including extraction from the national territory, as well as the resource requirements associated with imports. The TMR takes into account the extraction of resources for subsequent processing (Direct Material Input, or DMI) as well as Hidden Flows (HF), which are those extractions that are no longer used, but which burden the environment.

The ratio between the foreign and domestic shares of the TMR indicates possible shifts of environmental impacts between countries. Direct physical trade flows mainly report on the global redistribution of natural resources as direct physical inputs into the socio-economic systems of countries and regions. The central idea is that while trade relations between two countries or regions of the world may be balanced in monetary terms, they may be characterized by substantial inequality in terms of natural resource flows. In a nutshell, the MFA can analyze the countries in which the impacts are located, the resources used in these countries, the volume of such use, and the evolution over time of the composition and volume.

In a second part, the authors use other methods to quantify the "use at the expense of" aspect. They use two indicators: the ecological footprint and environmental space. The former can be defined as the total area of land and water required to support a population with a given lifestyle and technology, with all the necessary natural resources to absorb all its waste and emissions, for an indefinite period of time. Comparing the land use of a country's population with the ecological capacity available within the national territory can quantify sustainability deficits or surpluses. If a country's Ecological Footprint is greater than its available ecological capacity, it must "import" carrying capacity from elsewhere and/or deplete its natural capital faster than it can replenish it. It may also "export" waste in the form of carbon dioxide emissions in excess of what its vegetation and surrounding oceans can absorb.

Environmental space is based on two principles: that the Earth can only support a certain amount of pollution and resource use, and that everyone in the world should have an equal right to use natural resources. Based on these two assumptions, it is possible to calculate how much resource use is actually available to each person in the world. This is called ecological space. At this point, the concept of ecological debt can be introduced as the overconsumption of environmental space, both in the past and in the future.

Once these physical calculations have been made, the physical ecological debt is monetized using techniques from neoclassical environmental economics. Monetization in this paper serves the function of attracting attention, appealing to a wider audience, and countering external debt (Paredis et al., 2004 and 2008).

In response to the temptation to monetize ecological debt in order to make it comparable to external debt and given the constant dissociation between the monetary and biophysical components of economic phenomena, it is worth highlighting the methodology proposed by Schatan (1998), which first converts external monetary debt into biophysical units. If necessary, he uses the unit of account he himself created, the MAPRAL –a kind of acronym for Latin American Raw Materials–, which represents, as the case may be, a basket of exportable goods. Thus, the monetary scale (whose unit of account is money, in this case the US dollar) is combined with the biophysical scale (whose unit of account is materials and energy, in this case represented by the ecological footprint).

This paper establishes a method of calculation that analyzes Argentine exports between 1961 and 2018 through different implicit prices that incorporate the ecological footprint.³ These implicit prices allow us to quantify the environmental impact and compare exports corrected by such prices with the size of the external debt. The purpose of the calculation is not to put a price on nature, but to make the concept of ecological debt visible and to try to provoke reflection on the processes of external debt payments that are detrimental to peripheral countries.

In this regard, the methodology used establishes six steps through a series of indicators that allow us to verify Argentina's ecological creditor position:

1. The first consists in verifying the existence of ecologically unequal exchange (Peinado, 2018). For this purpose, we use the ecological footprint data extracted from the Global Footprint Network⁴ database 2022 edition for the period 1961-2018. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) extracted from the accounts of the World Bank⁵ is also analyzed.
   To compare the different Footprints with monetary indicators and to measure the importance of international trade in the Argentine production structure, we turn to the fundamental equations of macroeconomics in their analysis of national accounts. The results are as follows:
   
   (1) Aggregate Demand = Aggregate Supply
   
   With no distinction between public and private:
   
   (1') Consumption + Investment + Exports = Production + Imports
   (1'') Consumption + Investment + Net Exports = Output
   (1''') Domestic Absorption + Net Exports = Output
   
   In terms of Ecological Footprint (EF):
   
   (2) HE Output - HE Consumption = HE Net Exports
   (2') Consumption + HE Net Exports = HE Output
   (2'') HE domestic absorption + HE net exports = HE output
   
   
2. Production patterns were then analyzed in terms of the Ecological Footprint to demonstrate the environmental intensity of exports. This data was also extracted from the 2022 edition of the Global Footprint Network database for the period 1961-2018. The production pattern reflects the composition and volume of environmental pressure generated on Argentine ecosystems, either for domestic consumption (domestic absorption) or for trade with the rest of the world (exports). Using the basic equations of macroeconomics:
   
   (3) Production pattern = Consumption + Investment + Exports
   (3') production pattern = domestic absorption + exports
   
   In terms of Ecological Footprint (EF):
   
   (4) HE production pattern = HE domestic absorption + HE exports
   
   
3. Thirdly, in order to better describe the phenomenon, the ten most important products of the Argentine export basket for the reference period are identified using the database of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) (2023).
4. Once the weight of the exports and their high environmental impact have been verified, we then calculate four implicit prices resulting from the ratio of the amount in dollars of exports, imports, average imports and exports and weighted imports and exports averaged based on their quantities with the environmental impact that these variables generate, measured in global hectares (Gha). The following is calculated in this way:
   
   (5) Implicit price of exports (Px) = Exports (X) in USD$ / X in Gha (Ecological Footprint).
   (6) Implicit price of imports (Pm) = Imports (M) in USD/M in HE,
   (7) Average implicit price = (Px+Pm) / 2,
   (8) Weighted average price = (X + M in USD$) / (X+M in HE).
   
   Monetary import and export indicators are taken from the World Bank database, while global hectares are taken from the 2022 edition of the Global Footprint Network database for the period 1961-2018.
   
   
5. In the next step, these implicit prices are used to correct the monetary exports. This has a dual purpose: to calculate the price of each global hectare exported, and to compare how much Argentina would have received in monetary terms for its exports if it had been paid the three implicitly calculated prices.
   These "corrected exports" are then divided by the amount of the external debt (USD$) to compare how much of the external debt could have been repaid if exports had been paid at the implicit prices established. The amount of external debt is taken from World Bank data. In this case, the period since 1970 is used because the external debt database has been available since that year. Although this comparison mixes a flow variable (external debt) with a stock ("corrected exports"), it shows that if exports had the established implicit prices, the total payment of the external debt could be paid (or not) in several periods.
6. The next step is to calculate a difference, called the ecological credit, to establish the ecological debt of the rest of the world with Argentina. This difference is a subtraction between the exports valued by the different implicit prices and the exports actually collected.
7. Finally, the annual credit is calculated in order to transform it into a stock variable, thus obtaining the accumulated ecological debt. In addition, the ratio of the external debt to the accumulated ecological credit is calculated. In this case, we take only the credit calculated on the basis of the weighted implicit price of imports and exports (equation 8), based on the worst-case scenario in terms of implicit prices for Argentina.

The concept of ecological debt is intrinsically linked to ecologically unequal exchange, understood as the undervalued sale of energy-intensive materials and exports. The verification of the existence of ecologically unequal exchange can be observed in Figure 1: since 1961, the monetary share has always been less than 5%, while measured in terms of Ecological Footprint, this absorption has always exceeded 30% of the country's total absorption. This clearly shows the material and energy intensity of exported products, how they are undervalued and how domestic absorption is overvalued.

Meanwhile, although ecologically unequal exchange is perceived as a constant in the different patterns of accumulation⁶ that Argentina has experienced since 1961, in the period 2016-2018 we observe the paradox that in terms of global hectares, external absorption represented 39% of total absorption, while the trade balance was negative and represented an outflow of foreign exchange equivalent to 1.86% of GDP. The period 1976-2002 is similar to this one, with a deepening of ecologically unequal exchange, since there is not only unequal exchange in ecological terms due to the imbalance of matter and energy, but also at the cost of a deficit in the trade balance, in other words with a deficit in the flow of money.

On the contrary, the period in which the largest monetary contribution of foreign currency from the external sector was recorded was between 2003 and 2015, when it reached 3.75% of output. However, the external absorption in terms of ecological footprint increased and reached 43% of the total absorption. This shows how the intensity of exports in biophysical terms leads to an increase in exportable balances, generating an even greater exploitation of nature, which is detrimental to the country's environmental sustainability.

Looking at Argentina's production pattern in terms of the Ecological Footprint (see Figure 2), the hypothesis of the material and energy intensity of the export sector is confirmed, as well as how it has been accentuated by the financial valorization model since the 1970s. If we take the share of the export sector in global hectares, before 1976 it consumed 34% of the Ecological Footprint used for production, while between 1976 and 2003 it increased to 39% of the Ecological Footprint. A greater increase occurred between 2003 and 2015, when the sector producing exportable goods accounted for 50.7% of the footprint used for production, and finally, between 2016 and 2018, it accounted for 48% of this footprint. Thus, we can observe how the country's environmental sustainability is being held in check, depending on the export matrix, and from there we need to verify which are the exported products that are causing this growing environmental pressure.

In this regard, when we examine Argentina's export matrix, the link between the extraction of materials and energy and the exported products becomes clear, since only one of the ten most exported products on average between 1965 and 2018 is not directly related to the extraction of energy and materials, and that is "passenger cars, except buses" (see Table 1).

Table 2 shows the weight of the categories represented by these products. This shows the concentration of primary products and MOA in the most exported products, as both categories accounted for 84% of the 10 most exported products in the period between 1965 and 2018. Primary products include unmilled corn and wheat, soybean seed, and unmilled cereals, while the MOA category includes oilseed meal - the product with the highest share over the analysis period - soybean oil, lamp oil and turpentine, and "fresh, chilled or frozen beef and veal". The third category that represents an energy outflow in terms of its share is "fuels and energy", which represents 9% and is related to the export of crude oil. Finally, there is the category of manufacturing of industrial origin, with a share of 7%, whose exported product is "passenger cars, except buses". Thus, for the period analyzed, there is only one category that does not correspond to the direct extraction of materials and energy, demonstrating the ecological impact of Argentina's export matrix.

The fundamental component explaining ecologically unequal exchange is based on the theoretical hypothesis that the price of exports is undervalued because it does not take into account the material and energy intensity required for these activities. To underscore this assumption, we have calculated the implicit prices resulting from the ratio of the dollar amount of imports, exports, average imports and exports and weighted exports and imports averaged by their quantities to the environmental impact of these variables measured in global hectares. These implicit prices are used to correct monetary exports and to calculate how much our country would have received in monetary terms for its exports if the global hectares exported had been paid for with better implicit prices.

The results of these operations (see Figure 3) show the year-to-year evolution of the implicit price per global hectare of each component. These calculations confirm that exports are undervalued since the prices of exported global hectares are lower than the other three implicit prices calculated.

When comparing different economic stages, the implicit price of imports was 790% higher than the implicit price of exported global hectares between 1976 and 2002. In contrast, between 2003 and 2018, the ratio was 557%, where the implicit price of both imports and exports increased, but the price of the latter increased more.

The result of the implicit price calculation reflects the chronic undervaluation of material- and energy-intensive exports and demonstrates the existence of an ecological debt that the rest of the world owes to Argentina. The central questions would be: what would have happened if global hectares exported had received the implicit price of imports, the average of imports and exports, or the same weighted values? What comparison can be made with the size of the external debt?

To answer these questions, the implicit prices calculated to correct monetary exports were used. The purpose is to calculate how much our country would have received in monetary terms for its exports if they had been paid for at the implicitly calculated prices. These "corrected exports" are divided by the amount of the external debt in order to compare how much of the external debt could have been paid if the exports had been paid at the implicitly calculated prices.

Figure 4 shows the evolution of the ratio between exported global hectares valued at the different implicit prices and the external debt, in order to highlight the contrast between the external debt and the ecological debt. As can be seen, if exports had the implicit price of the imported Ecological Footprint or the average price of imports and exports, the total payment of the external debt could be met and in some periods there would be foreign exchange left to import or accumulate.

In this exercise, it should be clarified that a flow variable, such as annual exports, is set against a stock variable, such as external debt. It is worth making the methodological caveat to measure the proportion that represents the annual ecological credit generated in relation to the total accumulated debt. For example, if we take the year 2018, the monetary flow generated by exports represents 27% of the payment of the total external debt. If we take exports in global hectares valued at the implicit price of imports, the monetary flow is equal to 128% of the stock of external debt for the same year in question.

Thus, it is clear how Argentina's position as a sustainable supplier in international trade is determined both by the country's external debt and the need to generate foreign exchange held by the country (Mora et al., 2021), and by the low implicit price of exports, since even if the volume of exports grows, it ends up being insufficient in monetary terms. In this way, the undervaluation of exports, in other words the ecological credit, conditions and accentuates the dependence on external debt.

Finally, to visualize the ecological debt to the rest of the world, the country's ecological credit is calculated as the difference between the exports valued at the different implicit prices and the exports actually paid for each year. This is reflected in Figure 5, which shows the evolution of this annual ecological credit, which shows an increasing trend due to the increase in the volume of exports. Although the price of exports decreased from seven to five times the price of imports between 1976 and 2002 and 2003 and 2008. Taking into account the increase in exported volume, it can be seen how ecologically unequal exchange is accentuated, resulting in a higher ecological credit. In the latter period, annual ecological credits were 3.9 times higher than in the period 1976-2002.

To analyze the evolution of the accumulated ecological debt over the period 1970-2018, Figure 6 shows the exponential growth of the annual accumulated ecological credit, in this case taking the credit generated by the implicit weighted price between imports and exports. In turn, Figure 6 shows that during the period 2003-2018, the external debt represents, on average, only 3.2% of the accumulated ecological credit. Since 1985, this share has been below 10%, which means that the external debt represents less than one tenth of the accumulated ecological credit.

Finally, if we look only at the year 2018, the external debt implied 3.6% of the ecological credit accumulated up to that year. Thus, the monetization of ecologically unequal exchange through the market price of imports highlights the chronic undervaluation of Argentine exports. The accumulation of credits is linked to the need to export more and more undervalued products that involve the extraction of materials and energy, but which are not enough to offset the payment of the external debt with the current price system. The purpose of this practical evaluation exercise is to show how ecologically unequal exchange accumulates over time and, in turn, gives rise to the introduction of the swap of ecological credit for external debt as a way to alleviate the external front.

The main purpose of this paper is to link the effects of Argentina's external debt with its ecological effects, from a perspective that combines ecological economics with political economy. For this purpose, the concept of ecological debt has been used. This term, which originated in ecological economics, is linked to the concept of ecologically unequal exchange, understood as a one-way net transfer of materials and energy from countries like Argentina to the rest of the world. Here, the link between external debt and ecological debt is simple: the obligation to pay external debt and its interest requires a surplus of money, much of which comes from a reprimarized export basket and from this ecologically unequal exchange.

Although there is no methodological consensus on the calculation of the ecological debt, this analysis has applied its own methodology, which compares the external debt with the environmental impact of exports. Thus, Argentine exports from 1961 to 2018 were analyzed using different implicit prices that incorporate the ecological footprint, which allows us to quantify the environmental impact and compare exports corrected by such prices with the size of the external debt.

The result is clear: Argentine exports, taking into account the environmental impact, are paid worse than the price of imports, worse than the average price of imports and exports, and worse than the weighted price of imports and exports. In other words, the result of the implicit price calculation reflects the chronic undervaluation of material- and energy-intensive exports and demonstrates the existence of an ecological debt. In other words, if exports included the implicit price of the imported Ecological Footprint, or even the average price of imports and exports, the total payment of the external debt could be met, and in some periods there would be foreign exchange left over to import or accumulate.

In addition to these calculations, it can be seen that the period 1976-2002 is the one in which the difference between external debt and ecological credit (understood as the difference between exports valued at different implicit prices and exports actually paid) is greater, as a result of the accumulation pattern installed at that time, characterized by a marked increase in external debt.

In conclusion, this paper does not intend to put a price on nature, but rather to make the concept of ecological debt visible and to link it to Argentina's external debt, with the aim of guaranteeing fair trade for a country that is an ecological creditor, but a financial debtor, in the external debt negotiations. From the point of view of this analysis, the ecological debt is a key political-economic concept and an interdisciplinary tool to denounce the ecological unsustainability of the international integration of countries like Argentina and to question the mechanisms of domination generated by the legitimacy of the external debt.

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