With a central bank that fails to cut the trickle of international reserves after the soybean dollar, Despite major restrictions on importers and in a context of dollar shortages due to lower liquidation of agriculture in the latter part of the year, the government is analyzing new adjustments to the dollar for tourism, this time focusing on dollars that could enter the economy if there was a better remuneration for visitors to the country than that offered in the official market.

It was Sergio Massa himself who anticipated the imminent announcement of a new exchange rate for international tourists to liquidate their dollars in the formal circuit. It would be an intermediate price between the price of the blue dollar and that of the MEP dollar.

both quotes They range from $ 290, nearly 78% higher of what tourists get so far if they exchange their currency in an exchange house or bank.

The measure is worked out jointly between the Economics, Tourism and Central Bank portfolios. Official sources have confirmed to this newspaper that the changes for this market will be communicated this Thursday, at the next board of directors of BCRA. This would be the third attempt to create a schema that “drink” the gap and can capture the hospitality tourism dollars.

The first was the creation of special bank accounts for foreign tourists, announced exactly one year ago, without any impact. Then came the measure promoted by Silvia Batakis in her brief visit to the Palacio de Hacienda, whereby tourists can go to the bank and exchange their dollars for the value of the share dollar. This initiative also did not take off: only Banco Nación has implemented this option in its branches.

Now, the idea is to offer tourists a mechanism so that their debit and credit card purchases are calculated at the value of the MEP dollar, instead of the official dollar. In the financial sector they are still skeptical about the effectiveness of the measure, that if it worked it could capture some of the $ 2,400 million that has been earned so far this year from foreign tourism in the country.

One of the main questions about the measures is whether it will be possible to convince tourists to choose electronic means of payment, when many companies and even hotels offer them an attractive price to exchange their dollars and reais for pesos. But doubts grow especially when the “Qatari dollar” was announced almost three weeks ago, but neither banks nor fintech portfolios were able to implement the new scheme in its entirety.

as published Clarione, the measure announced in the middle of last month imposes a 25% surcharge for users whose dollar bills exceed US $ 300 per month. And that fee is applied to the CUIT or CUIL of bank customers and not summaries. But neither the banks nor the fintech have the possibility to “cross data” and verify if the same CUIT has expenses with other cards or other body.

While AFIP together with the financial system’s payment processors, such as Prisma and Fiserv, accelerate the creation of a system that allows per capita consumption to be calculated in real time to calculate the share, the institutions warn that the measure, at least for now, basically has blind spots.

This means that if a person with more than one card or account spends up to $ 299 on each, there is still no way to charge them the 25% personal property advance required by the Qatari dollar. That is, you can still consume installments but at one dollar at 285 dollars, instead of the 326 dollars that derive from the 100% tax burden on the official dollar.